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MY FARM. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



Just Published, in. neat pocket Edition*: 

BREAM LIFE. A Fable of the Seasons. One vol. 16tno. Printed on fine tinted 
paper, and bound in vellum cloth. Price $1.25. 

REVERIES OF A BACHELOR, A Book of the Heart. One vol. ISmo. Printed on 
fine tinted paper, and bound in vellum cloth. Price $1.25. 

Copies tent by mail, pott-paid, on receipt of prioe. 






V\ 



MY FARM 



OF EDGEWOOD: 



A Country Book, 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 



REVERIES OF A BACHELOR." 



"it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles 

covered the face thereof, and the stone-wall thereof was broken down. 
T/ienlsaw and considered, it well: I looked vp on it, and received 
matruoUon. n Peoveebs xxiv, 30. 



1 



- 

fix ' EIGHTH EDITION. ^ 






NEW- YORK: 

CHARLES SCRIBNER. 

1867. 



J 



Jfrc. /C, /P£ J 



Sszi 



MfeS 

^0% 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S63, by 

CHARLES SCEIBNEE, 

tn the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 
Southern District of New York. 



zr^ ! £ 



JOHN V. TR0T7, 

Peiwter, Stereotypfr, and Electp.otyper, 

60 Greene Street, New Tori;.. 



TO 
MY OLD FRIEND, 

GEN. WILLIAM WILLIAMS, 

OF NORWICH, 

IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF HIS MANY KINDNESSES, 
DATING FROM THE TIME 
WHEN HE AIDED ME IN MY FIRST CARE OF A NEW ENGLAND FAR1 
AND IN TOKEN OF MY RESPECT FOR HIS WORTH, 

I DEDICATE 

THIS TRANSCRIPT OF ANOTHER AND LATER 
FARM EXPERIENCE. 



PREFACE. 



A FRIEND afks, — "Are you not tired, then, of that 
fancy of Farming ? Is it not an expensive amuse- 
ment ; is it not a stupefying bufiness ? 

" Do you find your brain taking breadth or color out 
of Carrot-raifmg, or Pumpkins ? Poultry is a pretty thing, 
between Tumblers, and Muscovy ducks ; but can you not 
buy cheaper than you raise, — without the fret of foxes and 
vermin, — in any city market ? 

" Shall I sell out and join you ? Shall I teach this boy 
of mine (you know his physique and that gray eye of nis, 
looking after some eidolon) to love the country — so far as 
to plant himself there, and grow into the trade of farming ? 
A victory over the forces of nature, and of the seafons, — 
compelling them to abundance, — is no doubt large ; but is 
not a victory over the forces of mind, which can only 



viii . PREFACE. 

come out of sharp contadt with the world, immenfely 
larger?" 

In my reply, — loving the country as I do, and wiihing 
to set forth its praifes ; and believing as I do, in the God- 
appointed duty of working land to its top limit of pro- 
ducing power, — I said a great deal that looked like a mild 
Georgic. 

And yet, with a feeling for his poor boy, and a re- 
membrance of what crisp salads I had found in the city 
markets, after mine were all mined and devoured by the 
field-mice, — I wrote a great deal that had the twang of 
Melibceus in the eclogue, 

En ipse capellas 



Protenus /eger ago ! 

In short, in my reply, I beat about the bum : — so much 
about the bufh in fact, that this book came of it. 

Edgewood, 1863. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I.— THE SEARCH AND FINDING, .... 1 

II.— TAKING REINS IN HAND. 

Abound the House, ....... 43 

My Bees, ........ 49 

Cleabing Up, ......... 64 

What to Do with the Farm, . . . . .62 

Dairying, ........ 67 

Laborers, ........ 78 

A Sunny Frontage, ....... 90 

Fabm Buildings, ....... 94 

The Cattle, ........ 101 

III.— CROPS AND PROFITS. 

The Hill Land, ....... 118 

The Fabm Flat, ....... 128 

An Illtjstbation op Soiling, ..... 132 

An Old Obchabd, ....... 189 

The Peabs, . . . . . . . .149 

My Gabden, ........ 156 

Fine Tilth makes Fine Crops, . . . . .161 



CONTENTS. 






page 


Seeding and Trenching, • . 


164 


How a Garden should Look, 


167 


The Lesser Fruits, ...... 


171 


GrRAPES, ........ 


179 


Plums, Apricots, and Peaches, .... 


. 184 


The Poultry, ... ... 


, 188 


Is it Profitable? . . . . . 


196 


Debit and Credit, •••... 


. 199 


Money-Making Farmers, . .... 


205 


Does Farming Pay? ...... 


. 212 



IV.— HINDRANCES AND HELPS, 



The Argument, 


. 221 


Agricultural Chemistry, . 


. 223 


A Gypseous Illustration, . 


. 228 


Science and Practice, . , , 


. 284 


Lack of Precision, . . . , 


. 241 


Knowing too Mucn, . 


. 240 


Opportunity for Culture, . . 


. 249 


Isolation of Farmers, . . , 


. 254 


Dickering, .... 


. 260 


The Bright Side, 


. 267 


Business Tact, . . . , 


. 274 


Place for Science, . . . . 


. 278 


AESTHETICS OF THE BUSINESS, . 


. 283 


Walks, ..... 


. 288 


Shrubbery, .... 


. 292 


FwUral Decoration, . 


. 299 


Flowers, .... 


. 805 


L'Enyoi,. .... 


. 815 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 

IT was in June, 18 — , that, weary of a somewhat 
long and vagabond homelessness, during which I 
had tossed some half a dozen times across the Atlantic, 
— partly from health-seeking, in part out of pure va- 
grancy, and partly (me toedet meminisse) upon official 
errand — I determined to seek the quiet of a homestead. 
There were tender memories of old farm days in 
my mind ; and these were kindled to a fresh exuber- 
ance and lustiness by the recent hospitalities of a 
green English home, with its banks of laurestena, 
its broad-leaved rhododendrons, and its careless 
wealth of primroses. Of course the decision was for 
the country ; and I had no sooner scented the land, 
after the always dismal sail across the fog banks of 
Georges' shoal, than I drew up an advertisement for 
the morning papers, running, so nearly as I can recall 

it, thus : — 

1 



2 MY FARM. 

" Wanted — A Farm, of not less than one hundred 
acres, and within three hours of the city. It must 
have a running stream, a southern or eastern slope, not 
less than twenty acres in wood, and a water view." 

To this skeleton shape, it was easy, with only a 
moderately active fancy, to supply the details of a 
charming country home. Indeed, no kind of farm 
work is more engaging, as I am led to believe, than 
the imaginative labor of filling out a pleasant rural 
picture, where the meadows are all lush with ver- 
dure, the brooks murmuring with a contented babble, 
cattle lazily grouped, that need no care, and flowers 
opening, that know no culture. This kind of farm 
work is not, to be sure, very profitable ; and yet, as 
compared with a great deal of the gentleman-farm- 
ing which I have had occasion to observe, I should 
not regard it as extravagant. Perhaps it would not 
be rash to put down here some of the pictures which 
I conjured out of the advertisement. 

At times, it seemed to me that an answer might 
come from some Arcadia lying upon the cove banks of 
an inland river : the cove so land-bound as to seem like 
a bit of Loch Lomond, into which the north shores sunk 
with an easy slope, whose green turf reached to the 
margin, and was spotted here and there with old and 
mossy orcharding ; the west shore rose in a stiff bluff 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 3 

that was packed close with hemlocks and maples ; 
while beyond the bluff a rattling stream came down 
over mill dykes and through swift sluices, and sent its 
whirling bubbles far out into the bosom of the little 
bay. West of the bluff lay the level farm lands ; and 
northward of the green slope which formed the 
northern shore, it seemed to me that wooded hills 
would rise steep and ragged, with such wildness in 
them as would make admirable setting for the sloping 
grass land below, and the Sunday quiet of the cove. 
It seemed to me that possibly there might be an 
oyster bed planted along the shore, which would help 
out the salads that should be planted above ; and, 
possibly, a miniature dock might be thrust out into 
the water, at which some little pinnace might float, 
with a gay pennant at her truck. 

Possibly it does ; possibly there is such a place ; 
but for me it was only a picture. 

Again, it seemed to me that the farm house 
would nestle in some little glen upon the banks of 
a river, where every day crowded boats passed, surg- 
ing up against the current ; or gliding down with a 
meteor-like swiftness. 

In this case, the slopes were many : a slope east- 
ward from the house door to the banks of a little 
brook that came sauntering leisurely out from the 
wood, at the bottom of the glen ; a slope from the 



4 MY FARM. 

house up to the hills piling westward ; slopes on 
either margin of the glen ; and above them, upon 
higher ground, pasture lands dotted with stately 
trees ; while a fat meadow seemed to lie by the river 
bank, where the little brook came sauntering in. 
There, and thereabout, whisking their sides, stood 
the cattle, as in a Flemish picture — as true, as still, 
and just as real. There may be such cattle whisking 
their tails, but they are none of mine. 

Then, it seemed the home should be upon an isl- 
and, looking down and off to the sea, where ships short- 
ened sail, and bore up for the channel buoys, which 
lay bobbing on the water. There, the farm land end- 
ed in a pebbly beach, on which should lie a great 
drift of sea weed after every southeaster. The wood 
was a stately grove of oaks, taking the brunt of the 
northwesters that roared around the house in autumn, 
and making grateful lee for the pigeons that dashed 
in and around the gables of the barn. The brook 
seemed here a mere creek, which at high water should 
be flooded, even with the banks of sedge ; and when 
the tide was out, showed half a dozen gushing sj)rings 
which plied their work jantily till the ebb came, and 
then, after coquetting and toying with their lover, 
the sea — were lost in his embrace. 

Only a fancy ! If there be such a lookout 

from farm windows, the ships come and go with- 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 5 

out my knowledge ; and the springs gush, and die in 
the flow of the tide, unknown to me. 

Again, it seemed that answer would come from 
some remote valley side, away from the great high- 
ways of travel, where neither sail nor steamer ob- 
truded on the eye ; — where indeed a sight of the sea 
only came to one who climbed the tallest of the hills 
which sheltered the valley. Half down the hills an 
old farm house, with mossy porch, seemed to rest 
upon a shelf of the land. A cackling, self-satisfied, 
eager brood of fowls were in a party-colored cloud 
about the big barn doors ; a burly mastiff loitered in 
the sun by the house steps, mild-eyed cows were feed- 
ing beyond the pasture gate ; a brook that was half 
a river, came sweeping down the meadows in full 
sight — curving and turning upon itself, and fretting 
over bits of stony bottom, and loitering in deep 
places under alluvial banks, where I knew trout must 
lie — then losing itself, upon the rim of the farm, in 
tangled swamp lands ; where, in autumn, I knew, if the 
farm should be mine, I could see the maples all turned 
into feathery plumes of crimson. But I did not ; 
plumes of crimson I see indeed each autumn, but 
they are at my door ; and a great reach of water 
comes streaming to my eye without lifting from my 
chair. 

It was not from mere caprice that my advertise- 



6 MY FARM. 

ment had been worded as it was. For the mere estab- 
lishment of a country home, one hundred acres might 
seem an unnecessarily large number, as indeed it is. 
But I must confess to having felt an anxiety to test 
the question, as to whether a country liver was really 
made the poorer by all the acres he possessed beyond 
the one or two immediately about his homestead. 
Indeed I may say that I felt a somewhat enthusiastic 
curiosity to know, and to determine by actual experi- 
ment, if farm lands were simply a cost and an annoy- 
ance to any one who would not wholly forswear books, 
enter the mud trenches valorously, and take the pig 
by the ears, with his own hands. 

A half dozen acres, which a man looks after in the 
intervals of other business, and sets thick with his 
fancies, in the shape of orchard houses, or dwarf 
pear trees, or glazed graperies, offer no solution. All 
this is in most instances, only the expression of an 
individualism of taste, entered upon with no thought 
of those economies which Xenophon has illustrated 
in his treatise, and worse than useless as a guide to 
any one who would make a profession of agricultural 
pursuits. 

With fifty or a hundred acres, however, steaming 
under the plough, and with crops opening successively 
into waving fields of green, — into feathery blossom, — 
into full maturity ; too large for waste ; too consid- 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 7 

erable fcr home consumption ; enough, in short, to 
be brought to that last test of profit — a market, and 
a price ; then the culture and its costs have a plain 
story to tell. The basis will not be wanting for an in- 
telligent decision of the question — whether a man is 
richer in the cultivation of a hundred acres, or of ten ; 
whether, in short, farming is a mere gross employ- 
ment, remunerative, like other manual trades, to 
those immediately concerned ; or whether it is a pur- 
suit subject to the rules of an intelligent direction, 
and will pay the cost of such direction, without every- 
day occupancy of the field. 

My advertisement named three hours' distance 
from the city, as one not to be exceeded. Three 
hours in our time means eighty miles ; beyond that 
distance from a great city, one may be out of the ed- 
dies of its influence ; within it, if upon the line of 
some connecting railway, he is fairly in a suburb. 
Three hours to come, and three to go, if the necessity 
arise, leave four hours of the pith of the day, and of 
its best sunshine, for the usurers of the town. Double 
four hours of distance, and you have a journey that 
is exhausting and fatiguing ; double two hours, or 
less, and you have an ease of transit that leads into 
temptation. If a man then honestly determines to be 
a country liver, I hardly know a happier mean of dis- 
tance than three hours from the city. If, indeed, he 



8 MY FARM. 

enters upon that ambiguous mode of life which is 
neither city nor country, which knows of gardens only 
in the night time, and takes all its sunshine from the 
pavements, which flits between the two without tast- 
ing the full zest of either — of course, for this mode 
of life, three hours is too great a distance. The man 
who is content to live in grooves on which he is shot 
back and forth year after year — the merest shuttle 
of a commuter, — will naturally be anxious to make the 
grooves short, and the commutation small. 

I bespoke in my advertisement no less than twenty 
acres of woodland. The days of wood fires are not ut- 
terly gone ; as long as I live, they never will be gone. 
Coal indeed may have its uses in the furnace which 
takes off the sharp edge of winter from the whole 
interior of the house, and keeps up a night and day 
struggle with Boreas for the mastery. Coal may be- 
long in the kitchens of winter ; I do not say nay to 
this : but I do say that a country home without 
some one open chimney, around which in time of 
winter twilight, when snows are beating against the 
panes, the family may gather, and watch the lire 
flashing and crackling and flaming and waving, 
until the girls clap their hands, and the boys shout, 
in a kind of exultant thankfulness, is not worthy the 
name. 

And if such a fiery thanksgiving is to crackle out 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 9 

its praises — why not from a man's own ground ? 
There is no farmer but feels a commendable pride 
in feeding his own grain, in luxuriating upon his own 
poultry, in consuming his own hay — why not burn 
wood of his own growing ? It is not an extravagant 
crop. Thirty years of rocky, wild land, else unser- 
viceable, will mature a good fire-crop ; and if there be 
chestnut growth, will ensure sufficient size for farm 
repairs and fencing material. A half acre of average 
growth will supply at least one roaring winter's fire, 
beside the chestnut for farm purposes. And thus 
with twenty acres of wood, cut over each year, half 
acre by half acre, I have forty years for harvesting 
my crop ; and then, the point where I entered upon 
my wood field is more than ready for the axe again. 
Indeed, considering that thirty years are ample for the 
growth of good-sized fire wood, I have a margin of 
ten years' extra growth, which may go to pin money ; 
or may be credited to some few favorite timber trees 
that stand upon the edge of the pasture, and pay 
rental in the picture they give of patriarchal grace, — 
to say nothing of an annual harvest of chestnuts. 

Woodland, again, gives dignity to a country place ; 
it shows a crop that wants a man's age to ripen it ; a 
company of hoary elders — conservatives, if you will — 
to preside amid the lesser harvests, and to parry the 
rage of tempests. Mosses plant their white blight, as 
1* 



10 MY FARM. 

gray hairs come to a man ; but the core is sound, and 
the life sap swift, and in it are the juices of a thou- 
sand leaves. 

A wood, too, for a contemplative mind is always 
suggestive. Its aisles swarm with memories ; the 
sighing of the boughs in the wind brings a tender 
murmur from the farthest days of childhood, when 
leaves rustled all the long summer at the nurse's win- 
dow. Bird-nesting boyhood comes again to sit astride 
the limbs — to hunt for slippery elm, or the fragrant 
leaves of young wintergreen, or the aromatic roots of 
sassafras. 

This scarred bole, so straight and true, reminds 
of still larger ones in the forest of Fontainebleau ; the 
chestnuts recall the broad-leaved ones of the Apen- 
nines ; the hemlocks bring to memory the kindred 
sapin of the Juras, under whose shade I sat upon an 
August day, years ago, panting with the heat, and 
looking off upon the yellow plains which stretch be- 
yond the old French town of Poligny, and upon the 
shadows of clouds, that flitted over the far and 
" golden sided " Burgundy. 

Next, the coveted place was to have its quota of 
running water. It would be a very absurd thing 
to go far to find reasons for the love of a brook. 
There are practical ones of which every farmer 
knows the force ; and of which every farmer's boy, 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. \\ 

who has ever driven a cow to water, or wet a line in 
the eddies, could be exponent. 

And in the romantic aspect of the matter, I be- 
lieve there is nothing in nature which so enlaces one's 
love for the country, and binds it with willing fetters, 
as the silver meshes of a brook. Not for its beauty 
only, but for its changes ; it is the warbler ; it is the 
silent muser ; it is the loiterer ; it is the noisy 
brawler ; and like all brawlers beats itself into angry 
foam ; and turns in the eddies demurely penitent, 
and runs away to sulk under the bush. A brook, too, 
piques terribly a man's audacity, if he have any eye 
for landscape gardening. It seems so manageable, 
in all its wildness. Here in the glen a bit of dam 
will give a white gush of waterfall, and a pouring 
sluice to some overshot wheel; and the wheel shall 
have its connecting shaft and whirl of labors. Of 
course there shall be a little scape-way for the trout to 
pass up and down ; a rustic bridge shall spring across 
somewhere below, and the stream shall be coaxed into 
loitering where you will — under the roots of a beech 
that leans over the water — into a broad pool of the 
pasture close, where the cattle may cool themselves in 
August. In short, it is easy to see how a brook may 
be held in leash, and made to play the wanton foi you, 
summer after summer. I do not forget that poor 
Shenstone ruined himself by his coquetries with the 



12 MY FARM. 

trees and brooks at Leasowes. I commend the story 
of the bankrupt poet to those who are about laying 
out country places. 

Meantime our eye shall run where the brooks are 
running — to the sea. It must be admitted that a sea 
view gives the final and the kingly grace to a coun- 
try home. A lake view and a river view are well in 
their way, but the hills hem them ; the great reach 
which is a type, and as it were, a vision of the future, 
does not belong to them. There is none of that joy- 
ous strain to the eye in looking on them which a sea 
view provokes. The ocean seems to absorb all nar- 
rowness, and tides it away, and dashes it into yeasty 
multiple of its own illimitable width. A man may be 
small by birth, but he cannot grow smaller with the 
sea always in his eye. 

It is a bond with other worlds and people : the 
sail you watch has come from Biscay ; yesterday it 
was white for the eye of a Biscayan ; your sympathies 
touch by the glitter of a sail. 

The raft of smoke drifting from some steamer in 
the oning is as humanizing, though it be ten miles 
away, as the rattle of your neigbor's wagon by the 
door. 

You live near a highroad to take off the edge 
from loneliness and isolation ; but a travelled sea, 
where all day long white specks come and go, is 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 13 

the highway of the world ; and though you do not see 
these neighbors' faces, or catch their words, the 
drifted vapor, and the sheen of the sails, and the 
streaming pennants yield a sense of nearness and com- 
panionship that gives rein and verge to a man's hu- 
manity. 

Then, physically, — what reach ! Heaven and earth 
touch their great circles in your eye ; the touch that 
bounds human vision wherever you may go. No 
height can lift you to a grander touch, or alter one 
iota its magnificent proportions. With a land hori- 
zon, it may be an occasional hill that conceals the 
outmost bound, — a temple or a tree ; it is various and 
uncertain ; even upon the prairie a hardest of flowers 
may fringe it with an edge that the autumn fires con- 
sume, or which a trampling herd may beat down ; 
but where sea touches sky, there, forever, is the line 
immutable, which runs between our home and the 
spacious heaven, that buoys, and bears us. And 
thence, with every noontide, the sun pours a fiery 
profusion of gold up to your feet ; and there, every 
full moon paves a broad path with silver. 

So, with each of the features I have claimed, 
come kingly pictures ; — not least of all to the gentle 
slope south or eastward, which should catch the 
first beams of the morning, and the first warmth of 
every recurring spring. 



14 MY FARM. 

In a mere economic point of view, such slope is 
commended in every northern latitude by the best 
of agricultural reasons. In all temperate zones two 
hours of morning are worth three of the afternoon. 
I do not know an old author upon husbandry who 
does not affirm my choice, with respect to all tem- 
perate regions. If this be true of European countries, 
it must be doubly true of America, where the most 
trying winds for fruits, or for frail tempers, drive 
from the northwest. 

And with the slope, as with the wood and with 
the sea, come visions ; — visions of sloping shores of 
bays, into whose waters the land dips with every 
recurring tide ; and where, as the gentlest of tides 
fall (so upon the Adriatic coast), an empurpled line 
of fine sea mosses lies crimped upon white sand, and 
pearly shells glitter in the sun. Or, — of lake shores, 
gentle as Idyls (so of Windermere), with grassy 
slopes so near and neighborly to the water, that the 
mower, as he clips the last sentinels in green, sweeps 
his blade with a bubbling swirl of sound, quite into 
the margin of the lake. 

Southern slopes, again, suggest luscious ripeness. 
The first figs I ever gathered, were gathered on such 
a slope in a dreamy atmosphere of Southern France, 
with the blue of the Mediterranean in reach of the 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 15 

eye, and the sweetest roses of Provence lending a 
balmy fragrance to the air. 

Sheltered slopes recall too, always, what is most 
captivating in rural life. You never see them or look 
for them even, in Dutch-land — in Poland, never ; in 
Prussia, or on the highways of travel in France, 
never. And no rural poems, or pictures that haunt 
the memory, were ever rhymed or sketched in those 
regions. Theocritus lived where lie the sweetest of 
valleys ; Tibullus and Horace both knew the purple 
shadows that lay in the clefts of the Latian hills. De- 
lille chased his rural phantoms beyond the Burgundian 
mountains, before they had taken their best form. 

But in the English Isle— by Abergavenny, by Mer- 
thyr, under the Tors of Derbyshire, in the lea of the 
" Dartmoor hills, — abreast of Snowdon — what sheltered 
greenness and bloom ! What nestling homesteads ! 

I must not forget to give a sequence to my story. 
I had entered my advertisement. Was it possible 
that any one in the possession of such a place as I 
had roughly indicated, would be willing to sell ? 

For twenty-four hours I was in a state of doubt ; 
after that time, I may say the doubt was removed. 
I must frankly confess that I was astounded to find 
what a number of persons, counting not by tens, but 
by fifties, and even hundreds, were anxious to dis- 



16 MY FARM. 

pose of a " situation in the country " which fully 
corresponded to my wishes (as advertised.) 

Were the people mad, that they showed such 
eagerness to divest themselves of charming places? 
Or were my fine pictures possibly overdrawn ? And 
yet, who could gainsay them ; are not trees, trees — 
and brooks, brooks — and the sea, always itself? 

I think my New York friend, to whom I had or- 
dered all replies to be addressed, may have handed 
me a peck of letters ; — blue letters, square letters, 
triangular letters, pink letters (in female hand), and 
soberly brown letters. 

It was a mortification to me to reflect that so 
many fine places should be thrown upon the market 
at the first hint of a purchaser ; " places most con- 
venient ; " places on a " lovely shore ; " places by 
rivers ; places with commanding views ; places on 
prospective railways ; places innumerable. 

Not a few of the propositions contained in these 
letters were, at first sight, plainly inadmissible ; as 
where a sanguine gentleman suggested that I should 
make a slight change of programme, so far as to plant 
myself on the shores of the Great Lakes, or in a 
pretty retiracy, among the fine forests along the Erie 
railroad. 

Another, " in case I found nothing to suit else- 
where," could recommend " a small place of ten 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 17 

acres, in a thriving country town, two minutes' walk 
from the post office, house forty by thirty-five, and ten 
feet between joints, stages passing the door three times 
a day, large apple trees in the yard newly grafted, and 
the good will of a small grocery, upon the corner, to 
be sold, if desired, with the goods, and healthy." 

Inadmissible, of course ; and the letter passed over 
into the hat of my friend. Another letter, from a 
widow lady, invited attention to the admired place 
of her late husband : he had " an unusual taste for 
country life, and had expended large sums in beauti- 
fying the farm ; marble mantels throughout the 
house, Gothic porticos, and some statuary about the 
grounds. There was a gardener's cottage, and a far- 
mer's house, as well as another small tenement for an 
under-gardener, and twenty acres of land, of which 
six in shrubbery and lawns." The architecture seemed 
to me rather disproportionate to the land ; inadmis- 
sible upon the whole, as a desirable place on which to 
test the economies of a quiet farm-life. 

I can conceive of nothing so shocking to a hearty 
lover of the country, as to live in the glare of another 
man's architectural taste. In the city or the town 
there are conventional laws of building, established 
by custom, and by limitations of space, to which all 
must in a large measure conform ; but with the width 
of broad acres around one, I should chafe as much at 



18 MY FARM. 

living in the pretentious house of another man's or- 
dering and building, as I should chafe at living in 
another man's coat. Country architecture, whose 
simplicity or rudeness is so far subordinated to the 
main features of the landscape as not to provoke 
special mention, may be of any man's building ; but 
wherever the house becomes the salient feature of the 
place, and challenges criticism by an engrossing im- 
portance as compared with its rural surroundings, 
then it must be in agreement with the tastes and 
character of the occupant, or it is a pretentious false- 
hood. 

Perhaps I ought to beg the reader's pardon for 
this interpolation here, of a law of adjustment in re- 
spect to the country and country houses, which would 
have more perfect place in what I may have to say 
upon the general subject of rural architecture. 

At present I return to my stock of pleasant advi- 
sory letters : 

A tasteful gentleman, of active habits, calls my 
attention to a park of which he is the projector, and 
within which several desirable places, with admirable 
views, remain unsold ; while land in the neighborhood 
might be secured at a reasonable valuation, for such 
farm experiments as I might be tempted to enter 
upon. Attention is particularly called to the social 
advantages of such a neighborhood, where none but 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 19 

gentlemen of character would be permitted to pur- 
chase, and where the refinements of city intercourse 
would be, &c, &c. 

Now it so happens that I never heard of a park upon 
this mutual method, where there did not arise within 
a few years a smart quarrel between two or more of 
the refined occupants. The cows, or the goats, or the 
adjustment of water privileges, are sure to form the 
bases of noisy differences, in the management of 
which, I am sorry to say, the amenities of the town 
are not greatly superior to the amenities of the coun- 
try. Aside from this danger, I have not much faith 
in the marketable coherence of those rural tastes 
which would belong to a promiscuous circle of buy- 
ers. A community of cooks, or of coal-heavers, I can 
conceive of, but a community of ruralists, or of ama- 
teur farmers, quite passes my comprehension. I say 
amateur farming, for I know of no farming which is 
so amatory in the beginning, and so damnatory in the 
end, as that which delights in a suburban house, and 
in a sufficient quantity of ground a few miles away, 
where, under the wary eye of some sagacious Dutch- 
man or Irishman, the cows are to be fed, the weeds 
pulled, the chickens plucked, and the new industry 
and profit developed generally. It is very much as 
if a man were to enter upon the business of whaling 
by taking rooms at the Pequod House, and negotiat- 



20 MY FARM. 

ing with some enterprising skipper to tow a few tame 
whales into harbor, to be slashed up, and tried, and 
put into clean casks, on some mild afternoon of 
June. 

In the latter case, we should probably have the 
oil and the bone ; and in the other, we should per- 
haps have the butter and the eggs ; in both, we cer- 
tainly should have the bills to pay. 

If a man would enter upon country life in earnest, 
and test thoroughly its aptitudes and royalties, he 
must not toy with it at a town distance ; he must 
brush the dews away with his own feet. He must 
bring the front of his head to the business, and not 
the back side of it ; or, as Cato put the same matter 
to the Romans, near two thousand years ago, Frons 
oecipitio prior est. 

But while I was thus compelled to discard certain 
propositions at their first suggestion, there were 
others which wore such a roseate hue as challenged 
scrutiny and compelled a visit. Thus, a very straight- 
forward and business-like letter from a Wall-street 
agent informed me that his esteemed client, Mr. Van 
Heine, " was willing to dispose of a considerable coun- 
try property thirty miles from the city, in a favorable 
location. The house was not large or expensive, pos- 
sibly not extensive enough ;* there was old wood upon 
the place, the surface charmingly diversified, and in 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 21 

addition to other requisites, it possessed a mill site, 
mill, and small body of water, which, in the hands of 
taste, he had no doubt," &c, &c. 

The agent regretted that he could give me no de- 
finite information in regard to the exact size of the 
property, or terms of sale, but begged me to pay a 
visit to the place before deciding. 

The description, though not particularly definite, 
was yet sufficiently piquant and suggestive to induce 
me to comply with the hint of the agent. I liked the 
man's nomenclature — " a considerable country proper- 
ty ; " it conveyed an impression of dignified quiet and 
retirement. The dwelling was probably a modest 
farmhouse, grown mossy under the shade of the old 
wood ; possibly some Dutch affair of stone, with Yan 
Heine gables, which it would be hardly decorous to 
pull down. I might add a little to its size, and so 
make it habitable ; or, if well placed, it might — who 
knew — be turned into a cottage for the miller. There 
remained, after all this agreeable coloring, the small 
body of water and the diversified surface, which were 
enough in themselves to form the outlines of a very 
captivating picture. 

I determined to pay Mr. Yan Heine a visit. Ob- 
taining all needed information from his agent, in re- 
gard to the locality and its approaches from the city, 
I set off upon a charming morning of June by one 



22 MY FARM. 

of the northern railways, and after an hour's ride, 
was put down at a station some five miles distant 
from the property. I drove across the country at a 
leisurely pace, stopping here and there upon a hilltop 
to admire the far-off" views, and speculating upon 
possible improvements that might be made in the 
badly conditioned road. The neighborhood was not 
populous : indeed, it was only after having measured, 
as I fancied, the fifth mile, that I for the first time 
saw a party from whom I might ask special direc- 
tions. I may describe this party as a tall man in red 
beard and red fur cap, with a black-stemmed porce- 
lain pipe in his mouth, and pantaloons thrust into 
stout cowhide boots. He was striding forward in the 
same direction with me, and at nearly an equal pace. 

" Did he possibly know of a Mr. Van Heine in 
this region ? " 

" Yah — yah," and the man, who may have been an 
emigrant of only four or five years of American na- 
tionality, pointed toward himself with a pleased and 
grim complacency. 

" This was Mr. Van Heine, then, who has a coun- 
try property to sell ? " 

" Yah — yah," and his smile has now grown eager 
and familiar. 

His place is a little farther ; and I ask him to a 
seat beside me. 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 23 

" It is a farm he has to sell ? " 

" Yah— yah, farm." 

I ask if the view is good. 

" Yah — view — yah." 

I venture a question in regard to the mill. 

" Yah— mill— yah." 

" Grist mill ?" I ask. 

" Yah— mill." 

" For sawing ? " I add, thinking possibly he might 
misunderstand me. 

" Yah — sawing." 

I venture to ask after his crops. 

" Crops — yah." 

The conversation was not satisfactory : we were 
driving along a dusty highway, and had entered upon 
a sombre valley, where there was no sign of cultiva- 
tion, and where the only dwelling to be seen, was 
one of those excessively new houses of matched 
boards, perched immediately upon the side of the 
high-road, and with its pert and rectangular "join- 
ery " offending every rural sentiment that might have 
grown out of the blithe atmosphere and the morning 
drive. 

" Dish is de place," said my friend of the red 
beard and porcelain pipe ; and I could not doubt it ; 
there was a poetic agreement between man and 
house ; but the mill remained — where was the mill ? 



«4 MY FARM. 

Van Heine was only too happy : across the way — 
only at a distance of a few rods, not removed from 
the dust of the high-road, was the mill, and the " body 
of water." The new scars in the hillsides, from 
which the earth had been taken to dam the brook, 
were odiously apparent : but the investment had 
clearly not proven a profitable one : the capacity of 
the brook had been measured at its winter stage ; 
even now, the millpond at its upper end showed a 
broad, slimy flat, which was alive with frogs and 
mudpouts. A few scattered clumps of dead and 
seared alders broke the level, and a dozen or more of 
tall and limbless trees that had been drowned by the 
new lake, rose stragglingly from the water — making, 
with the dead bushes, and the loneliness of the place, 
a skeleton and ghostly assemblage. 

Mr. Van Heine had newly filled his pipe, and was 
puffing amiably, as I stood looking at the property, 
and at the sandy hills which rolled up from the fur- 
ther side of the pond, tufted with here and there a 
spreading juniper. The whole aspect of the property 
was so curiously and amazingly repugnant to all the 
rural fancies I had ever entertained, whether aesthetic, 
or purely agricultural, that I was excessively interest- 
ed. My red-bearded entertainer clearly saw as much, 
and with violent and persuasive puffs at his porcelain 
pipe, and occasional iterative " dams " in his talk, 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 25 

(which had very likely sprung of unpleasant familiar- 
ity with the dam actual) he became explosively de- 
monstrative and earnest. 

I hinted at the shortness of the water ; there was 
no denial on his part ; on the contrary, frank avowal. 

« Yah — dam— short," said he ; " dat ish — enough 
for der farm — yah ; but for der mill — dam — nichts " 
(puff). 

I spoke in an apologetic way of the advertisement, 
and of certain requisites insisted upon ; he had per- 
haps seen it ? 

" Advertisement — yah (puff) — yah." 

I hinted at the slope. 

" Yah — der slope." 

" The slope to the south ? " 

" Oh yah— south (puff)— yah." 

I explained by a little interpolation of his own 
tongue. 

" Dam — yah — dis ish it ; der is de pond ; dish is 
south ; dat ish der slope — to der pond — dam — yah." 

" And the lands opposite ? " 

" Oh, dat ish not mine ; der mill, der house, der 
pond, der land, vat you call der slope — dis ish mine." 

I suggested the mention of a water view in the 
advertisement. 

" View," said my red-bearded friend ; " vat you 

call view ? " 
2 



26 MY FARM. 

I explained as I could, teutonically. 

" Dam ! der vater view ! (with emphasis) ; dis ish 
it ; der pond, ish it no vater ? — hein ! — dam (puff)." 

Even now I look back with a good deal of self- 
applause upon my success in extricating myself from 
the merciless and magnetic earnestness of the red- 
bearded Mr. Van Heine ; I think of my escape from 
the dusty high-road, the angular joinery of the house, 
the bloated hills, blotched with junipers, the strag- 
gling trunks of the drowned trees, and the imper- 
turbable insistance of the German, with his expletive 
dam and his black-stemmed porcelain pipe, as I think 
of escapes from some threatening pestilence. 

Another country place was brought to my atten- 
tion, under circumstances that forbade any doubt of 
its positive attractions. There was wood in abun- 
dance, dotted here and there with a profuse and care- 
less luxuriance ; there were rounded banks of hills, 
and meadows through which an ample stream came 
flowing with a queenly sweep, and with a sheen that 
caught every noontide, and repeated it in a glorious 
blazon of gold. It skirted the hills, it skirted the 
wood, and came with a gushing fulness upon the 
very margin of the quiet little houseyard that com- 
passed the dwelling. And from the door, underneath 
cherry trees, one could catch glimpses of the great 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 21 

stretch of the Hudson into which the brook passed ; 
and the farther shores were so distant, tK t the Hud- 
son looked like a bay of the sea. A gaunt American 
who was in charge of the premises did the honors of 
the place, and in the intervals of expressing the juices 
from a huge quid of tobacco that lay in his cheek, he 
enlarged upon the qualities of the soil. 

To him the view or situation was nothing, but 
the capacity for corn or rye was the main " p'int." 

" Ef yer want a farm, Mister, yer want sile ; now 
this 'ere (turning up a turf with a back thrust of his 
heel) is what I call sile ; none o' yer dum leachy stuff; 
you put manure into this 'ere, and it stays 4 put.' " 

" Grows good crops, then," I threw in, by way 
of interlude. 

" I guess it dooz, Mister. Corn, potatoes, garden 
sass, — why, only look at this 'ere turf; see them clo- 
vers, and this blue grass. Ef you was a farmer — 
doan't know but you be, but doan't look jist like one 
— you'd know that 'tain't every farm can scare up 
such a turf as that." 

" Yery true," I remark ; while my lank friend ad- 
justs his quid for a new bit of comment. 

" Now here's Simmons on the hill — smart man 
enough, but doan't know nothing 'bout farmin' — 
them hills he's bought doan't bear nothin' but penny- 
rial ; ten acres on't wouldn't keep a good cosset 



28 MY FARM. 

sheep." And my friend expectorates with a good 
deal of emphasis. 

I suggested that many came into the country for 
good views and a fine situation. 

" I know it, sir," said my lank friend ; " this's a 
free country, and a man can do as he likes, leastwise 
we used to think so ; but as for me, give me a good 
black sile 'bout seven inches thick, and good turf top 
on't, and a good smart team, and I take out my 
views, along in the fall o' the year, in the corn crib. 
Them's my sentiments." 

I think I won upon my tall friend by expressing 
my approval of so sound opinions ; and in the course 
of talk, we found ourselves again upon the dainty 
lawn by the doorstep, near to which the brook 
surged along, brimful and deep, to the river. Over- 
deep, indeed, it seemed, for so near neighborhood to 
the house. An expression of mine to this effect was 
amply confirmed by the tall farmer. Only a year or 
so gone, a little child had tumbled in, and was 
" drownded." 

And this was perhaps the reason why the family 
left so attractive a place, I suggested. 

" Oh Lord, no, sir ; 'twas a pesky little thing, be- 
longed down to the landin'. Fever-'nager s'wbat driv 
the folks off, in my opinion." 

" Ah, they do have the fever about here, then?" 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 29 

" Gosh — Smithers here — p'raps you doan't know 
Smithers — no ; waal, he's got it, got it bad, that's so ; 
and what's wus, his chil'en s'got it, and his wife s'had 
it ; and my wife here, a spell ago, what does she do, 
but up and takes it, s'bad s'enny on 'em ; 'ts a dum 
curi's keind o' thing. You doan't know nothin' when 
'ts eomin' ; and you doan't know no more when 'ts 
goin' ; and arter 'ts dun, 'tain't no small shakes of a 
thing ; a feller keeps keinder ailin'." 

Upon a sudden the place took on a new aspect 
for me ; its cool shade seemed the murky parent of 
miasma ; the wind sighed through the leaves with a 
sickly sound, and the brook, that gave out a little 
while before a roistering cheerfulness in its dash, 
now surged along with only a quick succession of 
sullen plashes. 

I must recur to one other disappointment in re- 
spect of a country place, which possessed every one 
of the features I had desired in unmistakable type ; 
and yet all these so curiously distraught that they 
possessed no harmony or charm. I ought perhaps to 
except the sea view, which was wide to a fault, and 
so near that on turbulent days of storm, it must have 
created the illusion that you were fairly afloat. 

A sight of the sea, to temper a fair landscape, and 
lend it ravishing reach to a far-off line of glistening 



30 MY FARM. 

horizon, is a very different thing from that bold, 
broadside, every-day nearness, which outroars all the 
pleasant land sounds, making your country quietude 
a mere fiction, and the broad presence of ocean the 
engrossing reality. So it was with the place of which 
I speak ; beside this, the slope was slight and 
gradual — only one billowy lift — as if the land had 
some time caught the undulations of the sea after 
some heavy ground swell, and kept the uplift after 
the sea had settled to its fair-weather proportions. 
The brook was of an unnoticeable flow, that idled 
from a neighbor's grounds, and the wood, such as it 
was, only a spur of silver poplars that had stolen 
through from the same neighbor's territory, and had 
shot up into a white and tangled wilderness. 

The occupant and owner of the place — of may be 
seventy acres — was one of those wiry, energetic, rest- 
less young men of New England stock, thrifty, 
shrewd, spurning all courtesies, bound to push on in 
life ; a type of that nervous unrest by which God has 
peopled the West and California. Never gaming, 
but always despising, the calm that comes of satisfied 
endeavor, whether in the establishment of a home, or 
the accumulation of money, these fast ones are very 
confident in their ability Avithal, and in their judg- 
ment ; making light of difficulties, full of contempt 
for all knowledge which has not shown practical and 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 31 

palpable conquests. The owner had planted his farm 
to vegetables — not an acre of it but bristled with 
some marketable crop ; nearness to the city had war- 
ranted it, and " there was money in the business." 
To talk with such a man about comparative views, or 
situations, would have been to talk French with him. 
An unknown advertiser had demanded the very fea- 
tures embraced in his farm ; there they were — sea 
enough, brook, wood, and slope. If I wished them 
enough to pay his price, I could have them. He felt 
quite sure that I should find nothing that came nearer 
the mark, and he argued the matter with a strenuous, 
earnest vehemence, that fairly enchained my atten- 
tion ; and while my admiring aspect seemed to yield 
assent to every presentation he made of the subject, 
and while, as in the case of the red-bearded German, 
there was a sort of magnetism that bound me to outer 
acquiescence, at the same time all my inner feeling 
was kindled into open revolt against the man's pre- 
sumption, and his turnips, and his lines of cabbages, 
and his poplars, and near breadth of sea. 

He did not sell to me ; but I have no doubt that 
he sold ; I have no doubt that he made money by his 
turnips, and more money by the sale of his land ; and 
it would not surprise me to see him some day, if I go 
in that direction, speaker of the house of representa- 
tives in the State of Iowa, or Minnesota. There are 



32 MY FARM. 

men who carry in their presuming, restless energy the 
brand of success — not always an enviable one, still 
less frequently a moral one, but always palpable and 
noisy. Such a man makes capital fight with dangei 
of all sorts ; he knows no yielding to fatigues — to any 
natural obstacles, or to conscience. It is hard to con-, 
ceive of him as dying, without a sharp and nervous 
protest, which seems conclusive to his own judgment, 
against the absurd dispensations of Providence. Who 
does not see faces every day, whose eager, impas- 
sioned unrest is utterly irreconcilable with the calm 
long sleep we must all fall to at last ? 

But this story of unsuccessful experiences grows 
wearisome to me, and, I doubt not, to the reader. One 
after another the hopes I had built upon my hatful 
of responses, failed me. June was bursting every day 
into fuller and more tempting leanness. The stifling 
corridors of city hotels, the mouldy smell of country 
taverns, the dependence upon testy Jehus, who plun- 
dered and piloted me through all manner of out-of- 
the-way places, became fatiguing beyond measure. 

And it was precisely at this stage of my inquiry, 
that I happened accidentally to be passing a day at 
the Tontine inn, of the charming city of N — h — . (I 
use initials only, in way of respectful courtesy for the 
home of my adoption.) The old drowsy quietude of 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 33 

the place which I had known in other days, still lin- 
gered upon the broad green, while the mimic din of 
trade rattled down the tidy streets, or gave tongue 
in the shrill whistle of an engine. The college still 
seemed dreaming out its classic beatitudes, and the 
staring rectangularity of its enclosures and build- 
ings and paths seemed to me only a proper expres- 
sion of its old geometric and educational traditions. 

Most people know this town of which I speak, 
only as a scudding whirl of white houses, succeeded 
by a foul sluiceway, that runs along the reeking backs 
of shops, and ends presently in gloom. A stranger 
might consider it the darkness of a tunnel, if he did 
not perceive that the railway train had stopped ; and 
presently catoh faint images of a sooty stairway, be- 
grimed with smoke — up and down which dim figures 
pass to and fro, and from the foot of which, and the 
side of which, and all around which, a score of belch- 
ing voices break out in a passionate chorus of shouts ; 
as the eye gains upon the sootiness and gloom, it 
makes out the wispy, wavy lines of a few whips mov- 
ing back and forth amid the uproar of voices; it 
lights presently upon the star of a policeman, who 
seems altogether in his element in the midst of the 
hurly-burly. Becloaked and shawled figures enter 
and pass through the carnages ; they may be black, or 

white, or gray, or kinsfolk — you see nothing but be- 
2* 



84 MY FARM. 

cloaked figures passing through ; portmanteaus fall 
with a slump, and huge dressing cases fall with a 
slam, upon what seems, by the ear, to be pavement ; 
luggage trucks keep up an uneasy rattle ; brakemen 
somewhere in still lower depths strike dinning blows 
upon the wheels, to test their soundness ; newsboys, 
moving about the murky shades like piebald imps, 
lend a shrill treble to the uproar; the policeman's 
star twinkles somewhere in the foreground ; upon 
the begrimed stairway, figures flit mysteriously up 
and down ; there is the shriek of a steam whistle 
somewhere in the front ; a shock to the train ; a new 
deluge of smoke rolls back and around newsboys, po- 
lice, cabmen, stairway, and all ; there is a crazy shout 
of some official, a jerk, a dash — figures still flitting up 
and down the sooty stairway — and so, a progress into 
day (which seemed never more welcome). Again 
the backs of shops, of houses, heaps of debris, as if 
all the shop people and all the dwellers in all the 
houses were fed only on lobsters and other shellfish ; a 
widening of the sluice, a gradual recovery of position 
to the surface of the ground — in time to see a few tall 
chimneys, a great hulk of rock, with something glis- 
tening on its summit, a turbid river bordered with 
sedges, a clump of coquettish pine trees — and the 
conductor tells you all this is the beautiful city of 
N— h— . 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 35 

The natural impression of a stranger would be 
that the city was situated upon a considerable emi- 
nence, which had required deep boring for the proper 
adjustment of levels. The impression would be an 
unjust one ; in all that dreary sink of a station, there 
is no height involved except the height of corporate 
niggardliness.* The town is as level as Runnimede. 

A friend called upon me shortly after my arrival, 
and learning the errand upon which I had been scour- 
ing no inconsiderable tract of country, proposed to 
me to linger a day more, and take a drive about the 
suburbs. I willingly complied with his invitation ; 
though I must confess that my idea of the suburbs, 
colored as it was by old recollections of college walks 
over dead stretches of level, in order to find some 
quiet copse, where I might bandy screams with a 
bluejay, in rehearsal of some college theme — all this, 
I say, moderated my expectations. 

It seems but yesterday that I drove from among 
the tasteful houses of the town, which since my boy 

* The mere fact that the roadbed is beneath the general level, is 
a source of great convenience, but affords no reason for converting 
the station into a reeking cellar. The purchase of certain adjoining 
premises, and the transfer to them of offices and refreshment rooms, 
and the glazing of the roof, would enable the company to pour down 
a flood of light upon the dreary depot, and give it a height and 
breadth and airiness, which so rich a corporation fairly owes to the 
comfort of the public, as well as the reputation of the city. 



•j 6 MY FARM. 

time had erept far out upon the margin of the plain. 
It seems to me that I can recall the note of an oriole, 
that sang gushingly from the limbs of an overreach- 
ing elm as we passed. I know I remember the stately 
broad road we took, and its smooth, firm macadam. 
I have a fancy that I compared it in my own mind, 
and not unfavorably, with the metal of a road, which 
I had driven over only two months before in the en- 
virons of Liverpool. I remember a somewhat stately 
country house that we passed, whose architecture 
dissolved any illusions I might have been under, in 
regard to my whereabouts. I remember turning 
slightly, perhaps to the right, and threading the ways 
of a neat little manufacturing village, — catching 
views of waterfalls, of tall chimneys, of open pasture 
grounds ; and remember bridges, and other bridges, 
and how the village straggled on with its neat white 
palings, and whiter houses, with honeysuckles at the 
doors ; and how we skirted a pond, where the pads 
of lilies lay all idly afloat ; and how a great hulk of 
rock loomed up suddenly near a thousand feet, with 
dwarfed cedars and oaks tufting its crevices — tufting 
its top, and how we drove almost beneath it, so that 
I seemed to be in Meyringen again, and to hear the 
dash of the foaming Reichenbach ; and how we as- 
cended again, drifting through another limb of the 
village, where the little churches stood ; and how we 



THE SEARCH AND FINDING. 37 

sped on past neat white houses, — rising gently, — skirt 
ed by hedgerows of tangled cedars, and presently 
stopped before a grayish-white farmhouse, where the 
air was all aflow with the perfume of great purple 
spikes of lilacs. And thence, though we had risen so 
little I had scarce noticed a hill, we saw all the spires 
of the city we had left, two miles away as a bird 
flies, and they seemed to stand cushioned on a broad 
bower of leaves ; and to the right of them, where 
they straggled and faded, there came to the eye a 
white burst of water which was an arm of the sea ; 
beyond the harbor and town was a purple hazy 
range of hills, — in the foreground a little declivity, 
and then a wide plateau of level land, green and 
lusty, with all the wealth of June sunshine. I had 
excuse to be fastidious in the matter of landscape, 
for within three months I had driven on Richmond 
hill, and had luxuriated in the valley scene from the 
cote of St. Cloud. But neither one or the other for- 
bade my open and outspoken admiration of the view 
before me. 

I have a recollection of making my way through 
the hedging lilacs, and ringing with nervous haste at 
the door bell ; and as I turned, the view from the step 
seemed to me even wider and more enchanting than 
from the carriage. I have a fancy that a middle-aged 
man, with iron-gray whiskers, answered my summons 



38 MY FARM. 

in his shirt sleeves, and proposed joining me directly 
under some trees which stood a little way to the 
north. I recollect dimly a little country coquetry 
of his, about unwillingness to sell, or to name a price ; 
and yet how he kindly pointed out to me the farm- 
lands, which lay below upon the flat, and the valley 
where his cows were feeding just southward, and 
how the hills rolled up grandly westward, and were 
hemmed in to the north by a heavy belt of timber. 

I think we are all hypocrites at a bargain. I sus- 
pect I threw out casual objections to the house, and 
the distance, and the roughness ; and yet have an un- 
easy recollection of thanking my friend for having 
brought to my notice the most charming spot I had 
yet seen, and one which met my wish in nearly every 
particular. 

It seems to me that the ride to town must have 
been very short, and my dinner a hasty one : I know 
I have a clear recollection of wandering over those 
hills, and that plateau of farmland, afoot, that very 
afternoon. I remember tramping through the wood, 
and testing the turf after the manner of my lank 
friend upon the Hudson. I can recall distinctly the 
aspect of house, and hills, as they came into view on 
my second drive from the town ; how a great stretch 
of forest, which lay in common, flanked the whole, so 
that the farm could be best and most intelligibly 



TEE SEARCH AND FINDING. 39 

described as — lying on the edge of the wood ; and it 
seemed to me, that if it should be mine, it should 
wear the name of Edgewood. 

It is the name it bears now. I will not detail the 
means by which the coyness of my iron-gray-haired 
friend was won over to a sale ; it is enough to tell 
that within six weeks from the day on which I had 
first sighted the view, and brushed through the lilac 
hedge at the door, the place, from having been the 
home of another, had became a home of mine, and a 
new stock of Lares was blooming in the Atrium. 

In the disposition of the landscape, and in the 
breadth of the land, there was all, and more than I 
had desired. There was an eastern slope where the 
orchard lay, which took the first burst of the morn- 
ing, and the first warmth of Spring ; there was an- 
other valley slope southward from the door, which 
took the warmth of the morning, and which keeps 
the sun till night. There was a wood, in which now 
the little ones gather anemones in spring, and in au- 
tumn, heaping baskets of nuts. There was a strip of 
sea in sight, on which I can trace the white sails, as 
they come and go, without leaving my library chair ; 
and each night I see the flame of a lighthouse kin- 
dled, and its reflection dimpled on the water. If the 
brook is out of sight, beyond the hills, it has its 



40 MY FARM. 

representative in the fountain that is gurgling and 
plashing at my door. 

And it is in full sight of that sea, where even 
now the smoky banner of a steamer trails along the 
sky, and in the hearing of the dash of that very foun- 
tain, and with the fragrance of those lilacs around 
me, that I close this initial chapter of my book, and 
lay down my pen. 



TAKING REIN S IN IT AND 



II. 

TAKING BEINS IN HAND. 



Around the House. 

ALTHOUGH possessing all the special requisites 
of which I had been in search, yet the farm was 
by no means without its inaptitudes and roughnesses. 
There was an accumulation of half-decayed logs in 
one quarter, of mouldering chips in another, — being 
monumental of the choppings and hewings of half a 
score of years. Old iron had its establishment in 
this spot; cast-away carts and sleds in that; walls 
which had bulged out with the upheaval of — I know 
not how many — frosts, had been ingeniously mended 
with discarded harrows or axles ; there was the usual 
debris of clam shells, and there were old outbuild- 
ings standing awry, and showing rhomboidal angles 
in their outline. These approached the house very 
nearly, — so nearly, in fact, that in one direction at 



44 MY FARM. 

least, it was difficult to say where the province of 
the poultry and calves ended, and where the human 
occupancy began. 

There was a monstrous growth of dock and bur- 
dock about the outer doors, and not a few rank 
shoots of that valuable medicinal herb — stramonium. 
There were the invariable clumps of purple lilacs, in 
most unmanageable positions ; a few straggling 
bunches of daffodils ; an ancient garden with its 
measly looking, mossy gooseberries; a few straw- 
berry plants, and currant bushes keeping up inter- 
ruptedly the pleasant formality of having once been 
set in rows, and of having nodded their crimson tas- 
sels at each other across the walk. There were some 
half dozen huge old pear trees, immediately in the 
rear of the house, mossy, and promising inferior na- 
tive fruit ; but full of a vigor that I have since had 
the pleasure of transmuting into golden Bartletts. 
There were a few plum trees, loaded with black 
knot ; a score of peach trees in out of the way places, 
all showing unfortunate marks of that vegetable 
jaundice, the yellows, which throughout New Eng- 
land is the bane of this delicious fruit. 

There was the usual huge barn, a little wavy in 
its ridge, and with an aged settle to its big doors ; 
while under the eaves were jagged pigeon holes, cut 
by adventurous boys, ignorant of cmvilinear har- 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 45 

monies. Upon the peak was a lively weather-cock 
of shingle, most preposterously active in its motions, 
and trimming to every flaw of wind with a nervous 
rapidity, that reminded me of nothing so much as of 
the alacrity of a small newspaper editor. There was 
the attendant company of farm sheds, low sheds, 
high sheds, tumble-down sheds, one with a motley 
array of seasoned lumber, well dappled over with 
such domestic coloring as barn-yard fowls are in the 
habit of administering ; another, with sleds and 
sleighs, — looking out of place in June — and sub- 
mitted to the same domestic garniture. There was 
the cider mill with its old casks, and press, seamy and 
mildewed, both having musty taint. A convenient 
mossy cherry tree was hung over with last year's 
scythes and bush-hooks, while two or three broken 
ox chains trailed from the stump of a limb, which 
had suffered amputation. Nor must I forget the 
shop, half home-made, half remnant of something 
better, with an old hat or two thrust into the broken 
sashes — with its unhelved, gone-by axes, its hoes 
with half their blade gone, its dozen of infirm rakes, 
its hospital shelf for broken swivels, heel-wedges 
and dried balls of putty. 

I remember passing a discriminating eye over the 
tools, bethinking me how I would swing the broad- 
axe, or put the saws to sharp service ; for in bargain 



46 MY FARM. 

ing for the farm, I had also bargained for the imple- 
ments of which there might be immediate need. 

Directly upon the roadway, before the house, 
rose a high wall, supporting the little terrace that 
formed the front yard ; the terrace was a wilderness 
of roses, lilacs, and undipped box. The entrance 
way was by a flight of stone steps which led through 
the middle of the terrace, and of the wall ; while 
over the steps hung the remnants of an ancient arch- 
way, which had once supported a gilded lantern ; 
and I was told with an air of due reverence, that this 
gilded spangle of the town life, was a memento of 
the hospitalities of a certain warm-blooded West 
Indian, who in gone by years had lighted up the 
country home with cheery festivities. I would have 
cherished the lantern if it had not long before dis- 
appeared ; and the steps that may have once thronged 
under it, must be all of them heavy with years now, 
if they have not rested from their weary beat alto- 
gether. Both wall and terrace are now gone, and a 
gentle swell of green turf is in their place, skirted 
by a hedge and low rustic paling, and crowned by a 
gaunt pine tree, and a bowering elm. 

The same hospitable occupant, to whom I have 
referred, had made additions to the home itself, so as 
to divest it of the usual, stereotyped farm-house look, 
by a certain quaintness of outline. This he had done 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 47 

by extending the area of the lower story some 
ten feet, in both front and rear, while the roof of 
this annex was concealed by a heavy balustrade, 
perched upon the eaves ; thus giving the effect of 
one large cube, surmounted by a lesser one ; the 
uppermost was topped with a roof of sharp pitch, 
through whose ridge protruded two enormous chim- 
ney stacks. But this alteration was of so old a date 
as not to detract from the venerable air of the house. 
Even the jaunty porch which jutted in front of 
all, showed gaping seams, and stains of ancient leak- 
age, that forbade any suspicion of newness. 

Within, the rooms had that low-browed look 
which belongs to country farm-houses ; and I will 
not disguise the matter by pretending that they are 
any higher now. I have occasional visitors whom I 
find it necessary to caution as they pass under the 
doorways ; and the stray wasps that will float into 
the open casements of so old a country house, in the 
first warm days of Spring, are not out of reach of my 
boy, (just turned of five,) as he mounts a chair, and 
makes a cut at them with his dog-whip, upon the 
ceiling. 

I must confess that I do not dislike this old hu- 
mility of house-building ; if windows, open chimney 
places, and situation give good air, what matters it, 
that your quarters by night are three or four feet 



48 MY FARM. 

nearer to your quarters by day ? In summer, if some 
simple trellised pattern of paper cover the ceiling, you 
enjoy the illusion of a low branching bower ; and of 
a winter evening, the play of the fire-light on the 
hearth flashes over it, with a kindly nearness. 

I know the outgoing parties found no pleasant 
task in the leave-taking. I am sure the old lady who 
was its mistress felt a pang that was but poorly con- 
cealed ; I have a recollection that on one of my fur- 
tive visits of observation, I unwittingly came upon 
her — at a stand-still over some bit of furniture that 
was to be prepared for the cart, — with her hand- 
kerchief fast to her eyes. It cannot be otherwise at 
parting with even the lowliest homes, where we have 
known of deaths, and births, and pleasures, and little 
storms that have had their sweep and lull ; and 
where slow-pacing age has declared itself in gray 
hair, and the bent figure. It is tearing leaf on leaf 
out of the thin book where our lives are written. 

Even the farmer's dog slipped around the angles 
of the house, as the change was going forward, with 
a fitful, frequent, uneasy trot, as if he were disposed 
to make the most of the last privileges of his home. 
The cat alone, of all the living occupants, took mat- 
ters composedly, and paced eagerly about from one 
to another of her disturbed haunts in buttery and 
kitchen, with a philosophic indifference. I should not 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 49 

wonder indeed if she indulged in a little riotous 
exultation at finding access to nooks which had been 
hitherto cumbered with assemblages of firkins and 
casks. I have no faith in cats : they are a cold-blooded 
race ; they are the politicians among domestic ani- 
mals ; they care little who is master, or what are the 
over-turnings, so their pickings are secure ; and what 
are their midnight caucuses but primary meetings ? 

My Bees. 

A SHELF, on which rested five bee-hives with their 
buzzing swarms, stood beside a clump of lilacs, 
not far from one of the side doors of the farm house. 
These the outgoing occupant was indisposed to sell ; 
it was " unlucky," he said, to give up ownership of 
an old-established colony. The idea was new to me, 
and I was doubly anxious to buy, that I might give 
his whimsey a fair test. So I overruled his scruples 
at length, moved the bees only a distance of a few 
yards, gave them a warm shelter of thatch, and 
strange to say, they all died within a year. 

I restocked the thatched house several times after- 
ward ; and there was plenty of marjoram and sweet 
clover to delight them ; whether it was that the mis- 
fortunes of the first colony haunted the place, I know 
not, but they did not thrive. Sometimes, I was told, 



50 MY FARM. 

it was the moth that found its way into their hives ; 
sometimes it was an invasion of piratical ants ; and 
every summer I observe that a few gallant king birds 
take up their station near by, and pounce upon the 
flying scouts, as they go back with their golden 
booty. 

I have not the heart to shoot the king birds ; nor 
do I enter very actively into the battle of the bees 
against the moths, or the ants ; least of all, do I 
interfere in the wars of the bees among themselves, 
which I have found, after some observation, to be 
more destructive and ruinous, than any war with 
foreign foes.* I give them fair play, good lodging, 
limitless flowers, willows bending (as Virgil advises) 
into the quiet water of a near pool ; I have even read 
up the stories of poor blind Huber, who so loved the 
bees, and the poem of Giovanni Rucellai, for their 
benefit : if they cannot hold their sceptre against the 
tender-winged moths, who have no cruel stings, or 
against the ants, or the wasps, or give over their 
satanic quarrels with their kindred, let them abide 
the consequences. I will not say, however, but that 

* The Rev. Charles Butler, in his " Feminine Monarchie " (Lon- 
don, 1609), after speaking in Chapter VII of "Deir Enemies," 
continues: "But not any one of des e , nor all des e togeder, doo 
half so muc harm to de Bees, as de Bees. Apis api, ut homo homi- 
ni, Lupus. Dey mak de greatest spoil bot of bees and of hoonie. 
Dis robbing is practised all dc yeer." 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 51 

the recollection of the sharp screams of a little " curl 
pate " that have once or twice pierced my ears, as 
she ventured into too close companionship, has indis- 
posed me to any strong advocacy of the bees. 

My experience enables me to say that hives should 
not be placed too near each other ; the bees have a 
very human propensity to quarrel, and their quarrels 
are ruinous. They blunder into each other's homes, 
if near together, with a most wanton affectation of 
forgetfulness ; and they steal honey that has been 
carefully stored away in the cells of sister swarms, 
with a vicious energy that they rarely bestow upon a 
flower. In their field forays, I believe they are 
respectful of each other's rights ; but at home, if 
only the order is once disturbed, and a neighbor 
swarm shows signs of weakness, they are the most 
malignant pirates it is possible to conceive of. 

Again, let no one hope for success in their treat- 
ment, unless he is disposed to cultivate familiarity ; 
a successful bee-keeper loves his bees, and has a way 
of fondling them, and pushing his intimacy about 
the swarming time, which I would not counsel an 
inapt or a nervous person to imitate. 

Gelieu, a Swiss authority, and a rival of Huber in 
his enthusiasm, says : " Beaucoup de gens aiment les 
abeilles ; je n'ai vu personne qui les aima mediocre 
merit y on se passionne pour elles." 



52 MY FARM. 

I have a neighbor, a quiet old gentleman, who is 
possessed of this passion ; his swarms multiply indefi- 
nitely; I see him holding frequent conversations 
with them through the backs of their hives ; all the 
stores of my little colony would be absorbed in a 
day, if they were brought into contact with his lusty 
swarms. 

Many of the old writers tell pleasant stories of 
the amiable submission of their favorites to gentle 
handling ; but I have never had the curiosity to put 
this submission to the test. I remember that Yan 
Amburgh tells tender stories of the tigers. 

I have observed, however, that little people listen 
with an amused interest to those tales of the bees, 
and I have sometimes availed myself of a curious bit 
of old narrative, to staunch the pain of a sting. 

"Who will listen," I say, "to a story of M. 
Lombard's, about a little girl, on whose hand a whole 
swarm of bees once alighted ? " 

And all say " I " — save the sobbing one, who 
looks consent. 

M. Lombard was a French lawyer, who was 
for a long time imprisoned in the dungeons of Robes- 
pierre ; and when that tyrant reformer was beheaded, 
this prisoner gained his liberty, and went into the coun- 
try, where he became a farmer, and wrote three or four 
books about the bees : among other things he says : 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 53 

" A young girl of my acquaintance was greatly 
afraid of bees, but was completely cured of her fear 
by the following incident. A swarm having left a 
hive, I observed the queen alight by herself, at a 
little distance from the apiary. I immediately 
called my little friend, that I might show her this 
important personage ; she was anxious to have a 
nearer view of her majesty, and therefore, having 
first caused her to draw on her gloves, I gave the 
queen into her hand. Scarcely had I done so, when 
we were surrounded by the whole bees of the swarm. 
In this emergency, I encouraged the trembling girl to 
be steady, and to fear nothing, remaining myself 
close by her, and covering her head and shoulders 
with a thin handkerchief. I then made her stretch 
out the hand that held the queen, and the bees in- 
stantly alighted on it, and hung from her fingers as 
from the branch of a tree. The little girl, experien- 
cing no injury, was delighted above measure at the 
novel sight, and so entirely freed from all fear, that 
she bade me uncover her face. The spectators were 
charmed at the interesting spectacle. I at length 
brought a hive, and shaking the swarm from the 
child's hand, it was lodged in safety without inflict- 
ing a single sting." 

As I begin the story, there is a tear in the eye of 
the sobbing one, but as I read on, the tear is gone, 



54 MY FARM. 

and the eye dilates ; and when I have done, the sting 
is forgotten. 

I have written thus at length, at the suggestion 
of my thatch of a bee house, because I shall have 
nothing to say of my bees again, as co-partners with 
me in the flowers, and in the farm. I have to charge 
to their account a snug sum for purchase money, and 
for their straw housing — a good many hours of bad 
humor, and the recollection of those little screams 
to which I have already alluded. Thus far, I can 
only credit them with one or two moderately sized 
jars of honey, and a pleasant concerted buzzing with 
which they welcome the first warm weather of 
the Spring. Even as I write, I observe that a few of 
my winged workers are alight upon the mossy 
stones that lie half covered in the basin of the foun- 
tain, and are sedulously exploring the water. 

Clearing Up. 

^F course one of the first aims, in taking posses- 
sion of such a homestead as I have partially de- 
scribed, was to make a clearance of debris, of unne- 
cessary palings, of luxuriant corner crops of nettles 
and burdocks, of mouldering masses of decayed vege- 
table matter, of old conchologic deposits, and ferru- 
ginous wreck ; all this clearance being not so much 




TAKING REINS IN HAND. 55 

agricultural employment, as hygienic. There seems 
to have been a mania with the old New England 
householders, in the country, for multiplying enclo- 
sures, — front yards, back yards, south and north 
yards, — all with their palings and gates, which grow 
shaky with years, and give cover to rank and worth- 
less vegetation in corners, that no cultivation can 
reach. Of this multitude of palings I made short 
work : good taste, economy, and all rules of good 
tillage, unite in favor of the fewest possible enclo- 
sures, and confirm the wisdom of making the palings 
for such as are necessary, as simple as their office of 
defence will allow. 

So it happened under my ruling that the little 
terrace yard of the front lost its identity, and was 
merged in the yard to the north, — with the lit- 
tle bewildered garden to the south, — with the 
straggling peach orchard in the rear ; and all these 
merged again, by the removal of a tottling wall, 
with the valley pasture that lay southward; where 
now clumps of evergreen, and azalias, and lilacs 
crown the little swells, and hide the obtrusive angles 
of barriers beyond ; so that the children may race, 
from the door, over firm, clean, green sward, for a 
gunshot away. This change has not been only 
to the credit of the eye, but in every particular 
economic. The cost of establishing and repairing the 



56 MY FARM. 

division palings has been done away with ; the inac- 
cessible angles of enclosures which fed monstrous 
wild growth, are submitted to even culture and crop- 
ping ; an under drain through the bottom of the val- 
ley lawn, has absorbed the scattered stones and the 
tottling wall of the pasture, and given a rank growth 
of red-top and white clover, where before, through 
three months of the year, was almost a quagmire. 
This drain, fed by lesser branches laid on from time 
to time through the springy ground of the peach 
orchard, and by the waste way of the fountain at the 
door, now discharges into a little pool (once a mud 
hole) at the extremity of the lawn, where a willow 
or two timidly dip their branches, and the frogs wel- 
come every opening April with a riotous uproar of 
voices. Even the scattered clumps of trees stand 
upon declivities where cultivation would have been 
difficult, or they hide out-cropping rocks which were 
too heavy for the walls, or the drains. So it has 
come about that the old flimsy pasture, with its 
blotches of mulleins, thistles, wax myrtles, and the 
ill shapen yard, straggling peach orchard (long since 
gone by), have made my best grass field, which needs 
only an occasional top dressing of ashes or compost, 
and a biennial scratching with a fine-toothed harrow, 
to yield me two tons to the acre of sweet-scented 
hay. 



MAKING REINS IN HAND. 57 

I may remark here, in way of warning to those 
who undertake the renovation of slatternly country 
places, with exuberant spirits, that it is a task which 
often seems easier than it proves. More especially 
is this the case where there is an accumulation 
of old walls, and of unsightly, clumsy-shaped rocks 
to be dealt with. They may indeed be transferred 
to new walls ; but this involves an expenditure, often- 
times, which no legitimate estimate of a farm revenue 
will warrant ; and I propose to illustrate in this book 
no theories of improvement, whether as regards orna- 
mentation or increased productiveness, which a 
soimd economy will not authorize. Agricultural suc- 
cesses which are the result of simple, lavish expendi- 
ture, without reference to agricultural returns, are 
but empty triumphs ; no success in any method of 
culture is thoroughly sound and praiseworthy, except 
it be imitable, to the extent of his means, by the 
smallest farmer. The crop that is grown at twice its 
market value to the bushel, may possibly suggest a 
hint to the scientific theorist ; but it will never be 
emulated by the man whose livelihood depends upon 
the product of his farm. Those who transfer the 
accumulated fortunes of the city to the country, for 
the encouragement of agriculture, should bear in 
mind, first of all, that their endeavors will have 
healthy influence, only so far as they are imitable ; 



58 MY FARM. 

and they will be imitable only so far as they are sub- 
ordinated to the trade laws of profit and loss. Farm- 
ing is not a fanciful pursuit ; its aim is not to 
produce the largest possible crop at whatever cost ; 
but its aim is, or should be, taking a series of years 
together, to produce the largest crops at the least 
possible cost. 

If my neighbor, by an expenditure of three or 
four hundred dollars to the acre in the removal of 
rocks and other impedimenta, renders his field equal 
to an adjoining smooth one, which will pay a fair 
farm rental on a valuation of only two hundred dol- 
lars per acre, he may be congratulated upon having 
extended his available agricultural area, but he can- 
not surely be congratulated on having made a profit- 
able transaction. 

The weazen faced old gentlemen who drive by in 
their shirt sleeves, and call attention to the matter 
with a gracious wave of their hickory whipstocks, 
allow that — " it's fine ; but don't pay." Such obser- 
vers — and they make up the bulk of those who have 
the country in their keeping — must be addressed 
through their notions of economy, or they will not 
be reached at all. 

In the case supposed, I have, of course, assumed 
that only ordinary farm culture was to be bestowed : 
although there may be conditions of high tillage, 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 59 

extraordinary nicety of culture, and nearness to a 
large market, which would warrant the expenditure 
of even a thousand dollars per acre with profitable 
results. 

But rocky farms, even away from markets, are 
not without their profits, and a certain wild, yet sub- 
dued order of their own. I have never seen sweeter 
or warmer pasture ground, than upon certain hillsides 
strown thick with great granite boulders, spangled 
with mica, and green-gray mosses ; nor was the view 
unthrifty, with its fat, ruffle-necked merino ewes 
grazing in company ; nor yet unattractive to other 
than farm-eyes — with its brook bursting from under 
some ledge that is overhung with gnarled birches, 
and illuminated with nodding, crimson columbines — 
then yawing away between its green banks, with a 
new song for every stone that tripped its flow. 

One of the daintiest and most productive fruit 
gardens it was ever my pleasure to see, was in the 
midst of other gray rocks ; the grape vines so trained 
as to receive the full reflection of the sun from the 
surface of the boulders, and the intervals occupied 
with rank growing gooseberries and plums, all faith- 
fully subject to spade culture. The expense of the 
removal of the rocks would have been enormous ; 
and I doubt very seriously if the productive capacity 
would have been increased. Again, I have seen a 



GO MY FARM. 

ridge of cliff with its outlying slaty debris, in the 
very centre of a garden, which many a booby leveller 
would have been disposed to blast away, and trans- 
mute into walls, — yet under the hand of taste, so 
tressed over with delicate trailing plants, and so 
kindled up with flaming spikes of salvia, and masses 
of scarlet geranium, as to make it the crowning at- 
traction of the place. All clearance is not judicious 
clearance. 

But I have not yet cleared the way to my own 
back door ; though at a distance of only a few rods 
from the highway, I could reach it, on taking occu- 
pancy, only by skirting a dangerous looking shed, 
and passing through two dropsical gates that were 
heavy with a mass of mouldy lumber. 

These gates opened upon a straggling cattle yard, 
whose surface was so high and dense, as to distribute 
a powerful flow of yellow streamlets in very awk- 
ward directions after every shower. One angle of 
this yard it was necessary to traverse before reaching 
my door. My clearance here was decisive and 
prompt. The threatening shed came down upon the 
run ; the mouldering gates and fences were splin- 
tered into kindling wood ; the convexity of the cattle 
yard was scooped into a dish, with provision for 
possible overflow in safe directions. A snug compact 
fence blinded it all, and confined it within reasonable 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 61 

limits. A broad, free, gravelly yard, with occasional 
obtrusive stones, now lay open, through which I 
ordered a loaded team to be driven by the easiest 
track from the highway to the door, and thence to 
make an easy and natural turn, and pass on to the 
stable-court. This line of transit marked out my 
road : what was easiest for the cattle once, would be 
easiest always. There is no better rule for laying 
down an approach over rolling groimd — none so 
simple ; none which, in one instance out of six, will 
show more grace of outline. The obtrusive stones 
were removed ; the elliptical spaces described by the 
inner line of track, which were untouched, and which 
would need never to be touched by any passage of 
teams, were dug over and stocked with evergreens, 
lilacs, and azalias. 

These are now well established clumps, in which 
wild vines have intruded, and under which the brood 
of summer chickens find shelter from the sun, and the 
children a pretty cover for their hoydenish " hide and 
go seek." 

Thus far I have anticipated those changes and 
improvements which immediately concerned the com- 
fort and the order of the home. With these pro- 
vided, and the paperers and painters all fairly turned 
adrift, and the newly planted flowers abloom, the 
question occurs — what shall be done with the Farm ? 



62 MY FARM. 

What to Do with the Farm. 

THERE are not a few entertaining people of the 
cities, who imagine that a farm of one or two 
hundred acres has a way of managing itself ; and that 
it works out crops and cattle from time to time, very 
much as small beer works into a foamy ripeness, by 
a law of its own necessity. 

I wish with all my heart that it were true ; but it 
is not. For successful farming, there must be a well 
digested plan of operations, and the faithful execu- 
tion of that plan. It is possible, indeed, to secure the 
services of an intelligent manager, upon whom shall 
devolve all the details of the business, and who shall 
shape all the agricultural operations, by the rules of 
his own experience ; but however extended this expe- 
rience may have been, the result will be, in nine cases 
out of ten, most unsatisfactory to one who wishes to 
have a clear and intimate knowledge of the capabili- 
ties of his land ; and very disagreeably unsatisfactory 
to one who has entertained the pleasing illusion that 
farm lands should not only be capable of paying 
their own way, but of making respectable return 
upon the capital invested. Your accomplished farm 
manager — usually of British birth and schooling, but 
of a later American finish, — is apt to entertain the 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 63 

conviction that an employer who gives over farm 
land to his control, regards such farm land only as a 
pleasant parade ground for fine cattle and luxuriant 
crops, which are to be placed on show without much 
regard to cost. And if he can establish the owner in 
a conspicuous position on the prize lists of the Coun- 
ty or State Societies, and excite the gaping wonder- 
ment of old-fashioned neighbors by the luxuriance 
of his crops, he is led to believe that he has achieved 
the desired success. 

The end of it is, that the owner enjoys the honors 
of oflicial mention, without the fatigue of relieving 
himself of ignorance ; the manager is doubly sure of 
his stipend; and the inordinate expense under a 
direction that is not limited by commercial proprie- 
ties or proportions, weakens the faith of all onlookers 
in " improved farming." 

I am satisfied that a great deal of hindrance is 
done in this way to agricultural progress, by those 
who have only the best intentions in the matter. My 
friend, Mr. Tallweed, for instance, after accumulat- 
ing a fortune in the city, is disposed to put on the 
dignity of country pursuits, and advance the inter- 
ests of agriculture. He purchases a valuable place, 
builds his villa, plants, refits, exhausts architectural 
resources in his outbuildings, all under the advice 
of a shrewd Scotchman recommended by Thorburn, 



64 MY FARM. 

and can presently make such show of dainty cattle, 
and of mammoth vegetables, as excites the stare of 
the neighborhood, and leads to his enrolment among 
the dignitaries of the County Society. 

But the neighbors who stare, have their occasional 
chat with the canny Scot, from whom they learn that 
the expenses of the business are " gay large ; " they 
pass a quiet side wink from one to the other, as they 
look at the vaulted cellars, and the cumbrous ma- 
chinery ; they remark quietly that the multitude of 
implements does not forbid the employment of a 
multitude of farm " hands ; " they shake their heads 
ominously at the extraordinary purchases of grain ; 
they observe that the pet calves are usually indulged 
with a wet nurse, in the shape of some rawboned 
native cow, bought specially to add to the resources 
of the fine-blooded dam ; and with these things in 
their mind — they reflect. 

If the results are large, it seems to them that the 
means are still more extraordinary ; if they wonder 
at the size of the crops, they wonder still more at the 
liberality of the expenditure ; it seems to them, after 
full comparison of notes with the "braw" Scot, that 
even their own stinted crops would show a better 
balance sheet for the farm. It appears to them that 
if premium crops and straight-backed animals can 
only be had by such prodigious appliances of men 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 65 

and money, that fine farming is not a profession to 
grow rich by. And yet, our doubtful friends of the 
homespun will enjoy the neighborhood of such a 
farmer, and profit by it ; they love to sell him " likely 
young colts ; " they eagerly furnish him with butter 
(at the town price), and possibly with eggs ; his own 
fowls being mostly fancy ones, bred for premiums, 
and indisposed to lay largely ; in short, they like to 
tap his superfluities in a hundred ways. They admire 
Mr. Tallweed, particularly upon Fair days, when he 
appears in the dignity of manager for some special 
interest ; and remark, among themselves, that " the 
Squire makes a thunderin' better committee-man, 
than he does farmer." And when they read of him 
in their agricultural journal — if they take one — as a 
progressive, and successful agriculturist, they laugh a 
little in their sleeves in a quiet way, and conceive, I 
am afraid, the same unfortunate distrust of the farm 
journal, which we all entertain — of the political ones. 

Yet the Squire is as innocent of all deception, and 
of all ill intent in the matter, as he is of thrift in his 
farming. Whoever brings to so practical a business 
the ambition to astonish by the enormity of his 
crops, at whatever cost, is unwittingly doing discredit 
to those laws of economy, which alone justify and 
commend the craft to a thoroughly earnest worker. 

Having brought no ambition of this sort to my 



66 MY FARM. 

trial of country life, even if I had possessed the 
means to give it expression, I had also no desire to 
give over all plans of management to a bailiff, how- 
ever shrewd. The greatest charm of a country life 
seems to me to spring from that familiarity with the 
land, and its capabilities, which can come only from 
minute personal observation, or the successive devel- 
opments of one's own methods of culture. I can 
admire a stately crop wherever I see it ; but if I have 
directed the planting, and myself applied the dress- 
ing, and am testing my own method of tillage, I 
look upon it with a far keener relish. Every week it 
unfolds a charm ; if it puts on a lusty dark green, I 
see that it is taking hold upon the fertilizers ; if it 
yellows in the cool nights, and grows pale, I bethink 
me if I will not put off the planting for a week in the 
season to come ; if it curl overmuch in the heats 
of later June, I reckon up the depth of my plough- 
ing ; and when the spindles begin to peep out from 
their green sheaths day after day, and lift up, and 
finally from their feathery fingers shake down pollen 
upon the silk nestling coyly below, I see in it all a 
modest promise to me — repeated in every shower — 
of the golden ears that shall by and by stand blazing 
in the October sunshine. 

But all this only answers negatively my question 
of — what to do with the Farm ? 




TAKING REINS IN HAND. 67 

At least, it shall not be handed over absolutely to 
the control of a manager, no matter what good char- 
acter he may bring ; and I will aim at a system of 
cropping, which shall make some measurable return 
for the cost of production. 

Dairying. 

NY judicious farm-system must be governed in 
a large degree by the character of the soil, and 
by the nearest available market. It is not easy to 
create a demand for what is not wanted ; nor is it 
much easier so to transmute soils by culture or by 
dressings, as to produce profitably those crops to 
which the soils do not naturally incline. I am fully 
aware that in saying this, I shall start an angry buzz 
about my ears, of those progressive agriculturists, 
who allege that skilful tillage will enable a man to 
produce any crop he chooses : I am perfectly aware 
that Tull, who was the great farm reformer of his 
day, ridiculed with unction what he regarded as 
those antiquated notions of Yirgil, that soils had 
their antipathies and their likings, and that a farmer 
could not profitably impress ground to carry a crop 
against its inclination. But I strongly suspect that 
Tull, like a great many earnest reformers, in his ad- 
vocacy of the supreme benefit of tillage, shot beyond 



08 MY FARM. 

the mark, and assumed for his doctrine a universality 
of application, which practice will not warrant. I 
am perfectly confident that no light and friable soil 
will carry permanent pasture or meadow, with the 
same profit which belongs to the old grass bottoms 
of the Hartford meadows, of the blue-grass region, 
and of Somersetshire. I am equally confident that no. 
stiff clayey soil will pay so well for the frequent work- 
ings which vegetable culture involves, as a light 
loam. 

Travellers who are trustworthy, tell us that the 
grape from which the famous Constantia wine is 
made, at the Cape of Good Hope, is grown from the 
identical stock which, on the Rhine banks, makes an 
inferior and totally different wine : and my own obser- 
vation has shown me that the grapes which on the 
Lafitte estate make that ruby vintage whose aroma 
alone is equal to a draught of ordinary Medoc — only 
across the highway, and within gunshot, produce a 
wine for which the proprietor would be glad to 
receive a fourth only of the Lafitte price. 

Lands have their likings then, though Mr. Tull be 
of the contrary opinion. Any crop may indeed be 
grown wherever we supply the requisite conditions 
of warmth, moisture, depth of soil, and appropriate 
dressings; but just in the proportion that we find 
these conditions absent in any given soil, and are 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 69 

compelled to supply them artificially, we diminish the 
chances of profit. 

My own soil was of a light loamy character, and 
the farm lay within two miles of a town of forty 
thousand inhabitants. 

Such being the facts, what should be the general 
manner of treatment ? 

Grazing, which is in many respects the most invit- 
ing of all modes of farming, was out of the question, 
for the reason that the soil did not incline to that firm, 
close turf-surface, which invites grazing, and renders 
it profitable. Nor do I mean to admit, what many 
old-fashioned gentlemen are disposed to affirm, that 
all land which does not so incline, is necessarily infe- 
rior to that which does. If grazing were the chiefest 
of agricultural interests, it might be true. But it 
must be observed that strong grass lands have gen- 
erally a tenacity and a retentiveness of moisture, 
which forbid that frequent and early tillage, that 
is essential to other growths ; and upon careful 
reckoning, I doubt very much, if it would not appear 
that some of the very light lands in the neighborhood 
of cities, pay a larger percentage upon the agricultu- 
ral capital invested, than any purely grazing lands in 
the country. Again, even supposing that the soil 
were adapted to grazing, it is quite doubtful if the 
best of grazing lands will prove profitable in the 



70 MY FARM. 

neighborhood of large towns ; doubtful if beef and 
mutton cannot be made cheaper in out-of-the-way 
districts, where by reason of distance from an every- 
day market, lands command a low price. 

For kindred reasons, no farm, so near a large town 
of the East, invites the growth of grain : on this 
score there can be no competition with the West, 
except in retired parts of the country, where land is 
of little marketable value. 

What then ? Grazing does not promise well ; 
nor does grain-growing. Shall I stock my land with 
grass, and sell the hay ? Unfortunately, this experi- 
ment has been carried too far already. A near mar- 
ket, and the small amount of labor involved, always 
encourage it. But I am of opinion that no light 
land will warrant this strain, except where manures 
from outside sources are easily available, and are 
applied with a generous hand. Such, for instance, is 
the immediate neighborhood of the sea shore, where 
fish and rockweed are accessible ; or, what amounts 
to the same thing, such disposition of the land as 
admits of thorough irrigation. In my case, both 
these were wanting. I must depend for manurial 
resources upon the consumption of the grasses at 
home. 

And this suggests dairying : dairying in its ordi- 
nary sense, indeed, as implying butter and cheese 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 71 

making, involves grazing ; and can be most profitably 
conducted on natural grass lands, and at a large dis- 
tance from market, since the transport of these com- 
modities is easy. But there remains another branch 
of dairying — milk supply — which demands nearness 
to market, whieh is even more profitable, and which 
does not involve necessarily a large reach of grazing 
land ; the most successful milk dairies in this coun- 
try, as in Great Britain, being now conducted upon 
the soiling principle — that is, the supply of green 
food to the cows, in their enclosures or stalls. 

What plan then could be better than this ? 
Transportation to market was small ; the demand 
constant ; the thorough tillage which the condition of 
the soil required, was encouraged ; an accumulation 
of fertilizing material secured. 

The near vicinity of a town suggests also to a 
good husbandman, the growth of those perishable 
products which will not bear distant transportation, 
such as the summer fruits and vegetables. These 
demand also a thorough system of tillage, and a 
light friable soil is, of all others, best adapted 
to their successful culture. But on the other hand, 
they do not in themselves furnish the means of 
recuperating lands which have suffered from inju- 
dicious overcropping. Their cultivation, unless upon 
fields which are already in a high state of tilth, 



72 MY FARM. 

involves a large outlay for fertilizing materials and 
for labor — which at certain seasons must be at ab- 
solute command. 

In view of these considerations, which I com- 
mend to the attention and to the criticism of the 
Agricultural Journals, I determined that I would 
have my herd of milch cows, and commence profes- 
sional life as milkman ; keeping, however, the small 
fruits and the vegetables in reserve, against the time 
when the land by an effective recuperative system, 
should be able to produce whatever the market might 
demand. 

Happily, too, a country liver is not bound to a 
single farm adventure. If the cows stand sweltering 
in the reeking stables, it shall not forbid a combing 
down of the ancient pear trees, and the tufting of all 
their tops with an aboimding growth of new wood, 
that shall presently be aglow with the Bonne de Jer- 
sey, or with luscious Bartletts. 

If there is a rattle of tins in the dairy, the blue- 
birds are singing in the maples. If an uneasy milker 
kicks over the pail, there is a patch of Jenny Linds 
that make a fragrant recompense. If the thunder 
sours the milk, the nodding flowers and the rejoicing 
grass give the shower a welcome. 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 73 



Laborers 

HAYING decided upon a plan, the next thing to 
be considered is the personal agency for its 
administration. 

There was once a time, if we may believe a great 
many tender pastorals and madrigals such as Kit 
Marlowe sang, when there were milkmaids : and the 
sweetest of Overbury's " Characters " is his little 
sketch of the c faire damsel, ' who hath such fingers 
" that in milking a cow, it seemes that so sweet a 
milk-presse makes the milk the whiter or sweeter." 
But milkmaids now-a-days are mostly Connaught 
men, in cowhide boots and black satin waistcoats, 
who say " begorra," and beat the cows with the 
milking stool. 

Overbury says of the ancient British type — " Her 
breath is her own, which sents all the yeare long of 
June, like a newmade haycock." 

And I may say of the present representative — 
His breath is his own, which ' sents all the yeare 
long ' of proof spirits, like a newmade still. 

Overbury tenderly says — " Thus lives she, and all 
her care is she may die in the spring time, to have 
store of flowers stucke upon her winding sheet." 

And T, as pathetically : — Thus fares he, and all 



^4 MY FARM. 

his care is he may get his full wage, and a good 
jollification * nixt St. Parthrick's day. ' 

This is only my way of introducing the labor 
question, which, in every aspect, is a serious one to 
a party entering upon the management of country 
property. If such party is anticipating the employ- 
ment of one of Sir Thomas Overbury's milk-maydes, 
or of the pretty damsel who sang Marlowe's song to 
Izaak Walton, let him disabuse his mind. In place 
of it all, he will sniff boots that remind of a damp 
cattle yard, and listen to sharp brogue that will be a 
souvenir of Donnybrook Fair. In briefest possible 
terms, the inferior but necessary labor of a farm 
must be performed now, in the majority of cases, by 
the most inefficient of Americans, or by the rawest 
and most uncouth of Irish or Germans. 

There lived some twenty or thirty years ago in 
New England, a race of men, American born, and 
who, having gone through a two winters' course of 
district school ciphering and reading, with cropped 
tow heads, became the most indefatigable and inge- 
nious of farm workers. Their hoeing was a sleight of 
hand ; they could make an ox yoke, or an axe helve 
on rainy days ; by adroit manipulation, they could re- 
lieve a choking cow, or as deftly, hive a swarm of bees. 
Their furrows indeed were not of the straightest, but 
their control of a long team of oxen was a miracle 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 75 

of guidance. They may have carried a bit of Caven- 
dish twist in their waistcoat pockets ; they certainly 
did not waste time at lavatiuns ; but as farm workers 
they had rare aptitude ; no tool came amiss to them ; 
they cradled ; they churned, if need were ; they 
choj^ped and piled their three cords of wood between 
sun and sun. With bare feet, and a keen-whetted 
six-pound Blanchard, they laid such clean and broad 
swaths through the fields of dewy herdsgrass, 
as made a old-country-men " stare. By a kind of 
intuition, they knew the locality of every tree, and 
of every medicinal herb that grew in the woods. 
Rarest of all which they possessed, was an acuteness 
of understanding, which enabled them to comprehend 
an order before it was half uttered, and to meet occa- 
sional and unforeseen difficulties, with a steady assur- 
ance, as if they had been an accepted part of the 
problem. It was possible to send such a man into a 
wood with his team, to select a stick of timber, of 
chestnut or oak, that should measure a given amount ; 
he could be trusted to find such, — to cut it, to score it, 
to load it ; if the gearing broke, he could be trusted 
to mend it ; if the tree lodged, he could be trusted to 
devise some artifice for bringing it down ; and finally, 
■ — for its sure and prompt delivery at the point indi- 
cated. Your Irishman, on the other hand, balks at 
the first turn ; he must have a multil ude of chains \ 



76 MY FARM. 

he needs a boy to aid him with the team, and another 
to carry a bar ; he spends an hour in his doubtful 
estimate of dimensions ; but " begorra, its a lumpish 
tree," and he thwacks into the rind a foot or two 
from the ground, so as to leave a ' nate ' Irish stump. 
Half through the bole, he begins to doubt if it be 
indeed a chestnut or a poplar ; and casting his eye 
aloft to measure it anew, an ancient woodpecker 
drops something smarting in his eye ; and his howl 
starts the ruminating team into a confused entangle- 
ment among the young wood. Having eased his 
pain, and extricated his cattle, he pushes on with his 
axe, and presently, with a light crash of pliant 
boughs, his timber is lodged in the top of an adjoin- 
ing tree. He tugs, and strains, and swears, and splits 
the helve of his axe in adapting it for a lever, and 
presently, near to noon, comes back for three or four 
hands to give him a boost with the tree. You return 
— to find the team strayed through a gate left open, 
into a thriving cornfield, and one of your pet tulip 
trees lodged in a lithe young hickory. 

" Och ! and it's a toolip — it is ! and I was thinkm' 
'twas niver a chistnut ; begorra, it's lucky thin, it 
didn't come down intirely." 

These and other such, replace the New-Englander 
born, who long ago was paid off, wrapped his savings 
in a dingy piece of sheepskin, scratched his head re- 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 77 

flectingly, and disappeared from the stage. He has 
become the father of a race that is hewing its way 
in Oregon, or he is a dignitary in Wisconsin, or 
thwacking terribly among the foremost fighters of 
the war. 

Here and there remains an aged representative 
of the class, with all his nasal twang and his apti- 
tude for a score of different services ; but the chances 
are, if he has failed of placing himself in the legis- 
lative chambers of the West, or of holding ownership 
of some rough farm of his own, that he has some 
moral obliquity which makes him an outcast. 

Certain it is, that very few native Americans of 
activity and of energy are to be decoyed into the 
traces of farm labor, unless they can assume the full 
direction. American blood is fast, and fast blood is 
impatient with a hoe among small carrots. It is well, 
perhaps, that blood is so fast, and hopes so tall. 
These tell grandly in certain directions, but they are 
not available for working over a heap of compost. 
The American eagle is (or was) a fine bird, but ho 
does not consume grasshoppers like a turkey. 

In view of the fact that dexterous labor is not 
now available, there is a satisfaction in knowing that 
the necessity for it is year by year diminishing. 
Upon the old system of growing all that a man 
might need within his own grounds, a proper farm 



f8 MY FARM. 

education embraced a considerable knowledge of a 
score of different crops and avocations. The tend- 
ency is now, however, to centralize attention npon 
that line of cropping which is best suited to the land ; 
this limits the range of labor, while the improved 
mechanical appliances fill a thousand wants, which 
were once only to be met by a dexterous handicraft 
at home. None but a few weazen-faced old gentle- 
men of a very ancient school, think now-a-days of 
making their own ox yokes or their own cheese presses ; 
or, if their crop be large, of pounding out their grain 
with a flail. And it is noticeable in this connection, 
that the implements in the use of which the native 
workers were most unmatchable, are precisely the ones 
which in practical farming are growing less and less 
important every year ; to wit, the axe and the scythe : 
the first being now confined mostly to clearings of 
timber, and the second is fast becoming merely a 
garden implement for the dressing of lawns. 

I perceive, very clearly, from all this, that I am 
not to be brought in contact with a race of Arcadians. 
Meliboeus will not do the milking, nor Tityrus, — ■ 
though there shall be plenty of snoozing under the 
beech trees. It is also lamentably true that the un- 
couth and unkempt Irish or Germans, whom it be- 
comes necessary to employ, place no pride or love in 
their calling like the English farm laborers, or like 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 19 

that gone-by stock of New England farm workers at 
whom I have hinted. 

Your Irish friend may be a good reaper, he may 
possibly be a respectable ploughman (though it is 
quite doubtful) ; but in no event will he cherish any 
engrossing attachment to country labors ; nor will he 
come to have any pride in the successes that may 
grow out of them. 

Every month he is ready to drift away toward any 
employment which will bring increase of pay. He is 
your factotum to-day, and to-morrow may be shoul- 
dering a hod, or scraping hides for a soap -boiler. 
The German, too, however accomplished a worker 
he may become, falls straightway into the same 
American passion of unrest, and becomes presently 
the dispenser of lager bier, or a forager " mit Sigel." 

There is then no American class of farm workers 
in the market — certainly not in the Eastern markets. 
The native, if he possess rural instincts, is engrossed, 
as I have said, with some homestead of his own, or 
is trying his seed-cast among the Mormons, or on 
the prairies. All other parties bring only a divided 
allegiance, and a kind of makeshift adhesion to the 
business ; in addition to which, they bring an inno- 
cency that demands the supervision of a good farm 
teacher. 

Such a teacher your foreman may be, or he may 



80 MY FARM. 

not be ; if the latter, and lie have no capacity to con« 
vert into available workers, such motley materials, 
the sooner you discharge him the better ; but if he 
have this capacity, and is, besides, so far cognizant of 
your ownership, as not to take offence at your pres- 
ence, and to permit of your suggestions — cherish 
him ; he has rare virtues. 

From the hint3 I have already dropped in regard 
to the qualities and characteristics of the available 
" milkmaids " and ploughmen, it will naturally be 
inferred that I would not be anxious to entertain a 
large squad of such, under the low-browed ceilings 
of the country home I have described. 

And here comes under observation that romanti- 
cism about equality of condition and of tastes, which 
many kindly and poetically-disposed persons are in- 
clined to engraft upon their ideal of the farm life. 
There is, indeed, a current misjudgment on this head, 
which is quite common, and which the exaggerated 
tone of rural literature generally, from Virgil down, 
has greatly encouraged. The rural writers dodge all 
the dirty work of the farm, and regale us with the 
odors of the new-mown hay. The plain truth is, 
however, that if a man perspires largely in a corn- 
field of a dusty day, and washes hastily in the horse 
trough, and eats in shirt sleeves that date their cleanli- 
ness three days back, and loves fat pork and cabbage 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 81 

" neat," he will not prove the Arcadian companion at 
dinner, which readers of Somerville imagine, — neither 
on the score of conversation, or of transpiration. 
Active, every-day farm labor is certainly not congru- 
ous with a great many of those cleanly prejudices 
which grow out of the refinements of civilization. 
We must face the bald truth in this matter ; a man 
who has only an hour to his nooning, will not squan- 
der it upon toilet labors ; and a long day of close 
field-work leaves one in very unfit mood for apprecia- 
tive study of either poetry or the natural sciences. 

The pastoral idea, — set off with fancies of earth- 
en bowls, tables under trees, and appetites that are 
sated with bread and milk, or crushed berries and 
sugar, and with the kindred fancies of rural swains, 
who can do a good day's work and keep their linen 
clean, — is all a most wretched phantasm. Pork, and 
cabbage, and dirty wristbands, are the facts. 

Plainly, the milkmaids must have a home to them- 
selves, where no dreary etiquette shall oppress them. 
This home, which is properly the farmer's, lies some 
eighth of a mile southward, upon the same highway 
that passes my door. For a few rods the road keeps 
upon a gravelly ridge, from which, eastward, stretches 
away the wide-reaching view I have already noted ; 
and westward, in as full sight, is the little valley 

lawn, where the shadows of the copses lie splintered 
4* 



82 MY FARM. 

on the green. So it is, for a breathing space of level ; 
then the gravelly road makes sudden plunge under a 
thicket of trees ; a rustic culvert is crossed, which is 
the wasteway of the pool at the foot of the lawn ; 
and opposite on a gentle lift of turf, all overshad- 
owed with trees, is the farmery. Here, as before 
described, were outlying sheds, and leaning gables, 
and a wreck of castaway ploughs and carts ; and the 
scene alive with the cluck of matronly hens, conduct- 
ing broods of gleesome chickens, and with the side- 
long waddle of a bevy of ducks. I have a recollec- 
tion, too, of certain long-necked turkeys, who eyed 
me curiously on my first visit, with an oblique twist 
of their heads, and of a red-tasselled Tom, who 
sounded a gobble of alarm, as I marched upon the 
premises, and met me with a formidable strut. These 
birds are very human. I never go to the town but I 
see men who remind me of the gobblers ; and I never 
see my gobblers but they remind me pleasantly of 
men in the town. 

Immediately beyond the gates, which opened upon 
the farmery, was a quaint square box of red trimmed 
off with white (whose old-fashioned coloring I main- 
tain), being a tenant house of most venerable age, 
and standing in the middle of a wild and ragged 
garden. The road has made two easy curves up to 
this point, and skirts a great hill that rises boldly on 



TAKING KEINS IN HAND. 83 

the right ; on the left, and beyond the red tenant 
house with its clustering lilacs, and shading maples, 
is a mossy orchard ; and with the mossy orchard on 
the left, and the sudden hills piling to the right, the 
border of the land is reached. 

The wooden farmhouse, which lay SO quietly 
under the trees, at the foot of the hill, when I first 
saw the place, is long since burned and gone. It was 
the old story of ashes in a wooden kit — very lively 
ashes, that one night kindled the kit, and thence 
spread to the shed, and in a moment half the house 
was in flame. It was a picturesque sight from my 
window on the hill ; but not a pleasant one. A wild, 
sweeping, gallant blaze, that wrapped old powder- 
post timbers in its roar, and licked through crashing 
sashes, and came crinkling through the roof in a hun- 
dred wilful jets, and then lashed and overlaid the 
whole with a tent of vermilion, above which there 
streamed into the night great, yellow, swaying pen- 
nants of flame. But the burnt house is long since 
replaced by another. It would have been a simple 
and easy task to restore it as before : a few loads of 
lumber, the scheme of some country joiner, and the 
thing were done. But I was anxious to determine by 
actual trial how far the materials which nature had 
provided on the farm itself, could be made available. 

The needed timber could, of course, be readily 



84 MY FARM. 

obtained from the farm wood ; and from the same 
source might also be derived the saw logs for exterior 
covering. But from the fact that pine is very mucli 
more suitable and durable for cover, than the ordi- 
nary timber of New England woods, the economy of 
such a procedure would be very doubtful ; nor would 
it demonstrate so palpably and unmistakably, as I 
was desirous of doing, that the building was of home 
growth. I had seen very charming little farmhouses 
on the Downs of Hampshire, made almost entirely 
from the flints of the neighboring chalkbeds ; and in 
Cumberland and Westmoreland very substantial and 
serviceable cottages are built out of the rudest stones, 
the farm laborers assisting in the work. Now, there 
were, scattered along the roadside, as along most 
country roadsides of New England, a great quantity 
of small, ill-shapen stones, drawn thither in past years 
from the fields, and serving only as the breeding 
ground for pestilent briars. These stones I deter- 
mined to convert into a cottage. 

Of course, if such an experiment should involve a 
cost largely exceeding that of a simple wooden house 
of ordinary construction, its value would be partially 
negatived ; since I was particularly anxious to demon- 
strate not only the possibility of employing the humblest 
materials at hand, but also of securing durability and 
picturesqueness in conjunction with a rigid economy. 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 85 

I need not say to any one who has attempted a 
similar task, that the builders discouraged me : the 
stones were too round or too small ; they had no 
face ; but I insisted upon my plan — only yielding 
the use of bricks for the corners, and for the window 
jambs. 

I further insisted that no stone should be touched 
with a hammer ; and that, so far as feasible, the mossy 
or weather sides of the stones should be exposed. 
The cementing material was simple mortar, made of 
shell lime and sharp sand ; the only exception being 
one course of five or six inches in depth, laid in water 
cement, six inches above the ground, and intended to 
prevent the ascent of moisture through the mason 
work. The house walls were of the uniform height 
of ten feet, covered with a roof of sharp pitch. The 
gables were carried up with plank laid on vertically, 
and thoroughly battened ; and to give picturesque 
effect as well as added space upon the garret floor, 
the gables overhang the walls by the space of a foot, 
and are supported by the projecting floor beams, 
which are rounded at their ends, but otherwise left 
rough. This feature, as well as the sharp pent roof, 
was an English one, and a pleasant reminder of old 
houses I had seen in the neighborhood of Gloucester. 

To avoid the expense of a great number of win- 
dow jambs, which, being of brick, were not of homo 



86 MY FARM. 

origin, I conceived the idea of throwing two or three 
windows into one ; thus giving, for purely economic 
reasons, a certain Swiss aspect to the building, and a 
pleasant souvenir of a sunny Sunday in Meyringen. 
These broad windows, it must be observed, have no 
cumbrous lintels of stone — for none such were to be 
found upon the farm ; but the superincumbent wall is 
supported by stanch timbers of oak, and these dis- 
guised or concealed by little protecting rooflets of 
plank. Thus far, simple economy governed every 
part of the design ; but to give increased architectural 
effect, as well as comfort, a porch, with peak corre- 
sponding in shape to the gable, was thrown out over 
the principal door to the south ; and this porch was 
constructed entirely, saving its roof, of cedar un- 
stripped of its bark. If it has not been removed, 
there is a parsonage house at Ambleside in the lake 
country of Westmoreland, which shows very much 
such another, even to the diamond loophole in its 
peak. 

Again, the chimneys, of which there are two, 
instead of being completed in staring red, were car- 
ried up in alternate checkers of cobbles and brick, 
the whole surmounted by a projecting coping of 
mossy stones. In view of the fact that this architec- 
tural device demanded dexterous handling, I cannot 
allege its economy ; but its extra cost was so trifling, 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 87 

and its pleasant juxtaposition of tints was so sugges- 
tive of the particolored devices that I had seen on 
the country houses of Lombardy, that the chimneys 
have become cheap little monuments of loiterings in 
Italy. 

The plank of the gables, wholly unplaned, has 
been painted a neutral tint to harmonize with the 
stone, and the battens are white, to accord with the 
lines of mortar in the wall below ; the commingled 
brick and stone of the house, are repeated in the 
chimneys above ; the roof has now taken on a gray 
tint ; the lichens are fast forming on the lower 
stones ; a few vines, — the Virginia creeper chiefest 
(Ampelopsis Hederacea), — are fastening into the crev- 
ices, making wreaths about the windows all the 
summer through, and in autumn hang flaming on the 
wall. There is a May crimson, too, from the rose- 
bushes that are trailed upon the porch. It is all 
heavily shaded ; a long, low wall of gray, lighted with 
red-bordered embrasures, taking mellowness from 
every added year ; there are no blinds to repair ; 
there is but little paint to renew ; it is warm in win- 
ter ; it is cool in summer ; vines cling to it kindly ; 
the lichens love it ; I would not replace its homeliness 
with the jauntiest green-blinded house in the country. 

Of course so anomalous a structure called out the 
witticisms of my country neighbors. " Was it a 



88 MY FARM. 

blacksmith's shop ? " " Was it a saw mill ? " and with 
a loud appreciatory " guffaw " the critics pass by. 

Our country tastes are as yet very ambitious ; 
homeliness and simplicity are not appetizing enough. 
But in time we shall ripen into a wholesome severity, 
in this matter. I am gratified to perceive that the 
harshest observers of my poor cottage in the begin- 
ning, have now come to regard it with a kindly inter- 
est. It mates so fairly with the landscape, — it mates 
so fairly with its purpose ; it is so resolutely unpre- 
tending, and carries such air of permanence and dura- 
bility, that it wins and has won upon the most arrant 
doubters. 

The country neighbors were inclined to look upon 
the affair as a piece of stupidity, not comparable with 
a fine white house, set off by cupola and green blinds. 
But it was presently observed that cultivated people 
from the town, in driving past, halted for a better 
view ; the halts became frequent ; it was intimated 
that So-and-so, of high repute, absolutely admired the 
homeliness. Whereupon the country critics under- 
took an inquiry into the causes of their distaste, and 
queried if their judgment might not have need of 
revision. Did their opinion spring from a discerning 
measurement of the real fitness of a country house, 
or out of a cherished and traditional regard for white 
and green ? 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 89 

The final question, however, in regard to it, as a 
matter of practical interest, is one of economy. Can 
a house of the homely material and character de- 
scribed be built cheaply ? Unquestionably. In my 
own case the cost of a cottage fifty feet by twenty-six, 
and with ten-feet walls — containing five serviceable 
rooms, besides closets on its main floor, and two large 
chambers of good height under the roof, as well as 
dairy room in the east end of the cellar — was be- 
tween eleven and twelve hundred dollars. The esti- 
mates given me for a wooden house, of the stereo- 
typed aspect and similar dimensions, were within a 
few dollars of the same sum. 

It must be remembered, however, that any novelty 
of construction in a particular district, costs by reason 
of its novelty ; the mason, too, charges for the possi- 
ble difficulties of overcoming his inexperience in the 
material. The carpenter rates the rough joining at 
the same figure with the old mouldings and finishing 
boards, to which he is accustomed, and of which he 
may have a stock on hand. Yet, notwithstanding 
these drawbacks, the work was accomplished within 
the limits of cost which the most economic would 
have reckoned essential to a building of equal capa- 
city. 

It is further to be considered that while I paid 
skilful masons for this rough work the same price 



90 MY FARM. 

which they exacted for the nice work of cities, it 
would have been quite possible for an intelligent pro- 
prietor to commit very much of it to an ordinary farm 
laborer, and so reduce the cost by at least one third. 

I have dwelt at length upon this little architectural 
experience, because I believe that such meagre details 
of construction as I have given may be of service to 
those having occasion to erect similar tenant houses ; 
and again, because in view of the fact that we must 
in time have a race of farm laborers among us, who 
shall also be householders, I count it a duty to make 
such use of the homely materials at hand, as shall 
insure durability and comfort, while the simplicity 
of detail will allow the owner to avail himself of his 
own labor and ingenuity, in the construction. 



A Sunny Frontage. 

SUCH a farmhouse as I have described, should 
have, in all northern latitudes, a sheltered position 
and a sunny exposure. Of course, a situation conve- 
nient to the fields under tillage, and to other farm 
buildings, is to be sought ; but beyond this, no law 
of propriety, of good taste, or of comfort, is more im- 
perative than shelter from bleak winds, and a frontage 
to the south. No neighbor can bring such cheer to 
a man's doorstep as the sun. 



TAKING REINS IN HANI). 91 

There are absurd ideas afloat in regard to the front, 
and back side of a house, which infect village morals 
and manners in a most base and unmeaning way. In 
half the country towns, and by half the farmers, it is 
considered necessary to retain a pretending front 
side upon some dusty street or highway, with tightly 
closed blinds and bolted door ; with parlors only 
ventured upon in an uneasy way from month to 
month, to consult some gilt-bound dictionary, or Mu- 
seum, that lies there in state, like a king's coffin. The 
occupant, meantime, will be living in some back cor- 
ner, — slipping in and out at back doors, never at ease 
save in his most uninviting room, and as much a 
stranger to the blinded parlor, which very likely en- 
grosses the best half of his house, as his visitor, the 
country parson. All this is as arrant a sham, and 
affectation, as the worst ones of the cities. 

It is true that every man will wish to set aside a 
certain portion of his house for the offices of hospi- 
tality. But the easy and familiar hospitalities of a 
country village, or of the farmer, do not call for any 
exceptional stateliness ; the farmer invites his best 
friends to his habitual living room ; let him see to it 
then that his living room be the sunniest, and most 
cheerful of his house. So, his friends will come to 
love it, and he, and his children — to love it and to 
cherish it, so that it shall be the rallying point of the 



92 MY FARM. 

household affections through all time. No sea so dis- 
tant, but the memory of a cheery, sunlit home-room, 
with its pictures on the wall, and its flame upon the 
hearth, shall haunt the voyager's thought ; and the 
flame upon the hearth, and the sunlit window, will 
pave a white path over the intervening waters, where 
tenderest fancies, like angels, shall come and go. No 
soldier, wounded on these battle fields of ours, and 
feeling the mists of death gathering round him, but 
will call back with a gushing fondness such glimpse 
of a cheery and cherished hearthstone, and feel hope 
and heart lighted by the vision — bringing to his last 
hold on earth his most hallowed memories ; and so, 
binding by the tenderest of links, the heartiest of the 
Old life, to the bloody dawn of the New. 

There is a deeper philosophy in this than may at 
first sight appear. Who shall tell us how many a 
breakdown of a wayward son, is traceable to the 
cheerless aspect of his own home, and fireside ? 

But just now I am no moralist — only housebuild- 
er. In the farm cottage, whose principal features I 
have detailed, I have given fifty feet of frontage to 
the south, and only the gable end, with its windows, 
to the street. As I enter the white wicket by the 
corner, under the elm tree which bowers it, the distri- 
bution counts thus : a miniature parlor with its look- 
out to the street, and a broad window to the south ; 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 93 

next is the rustic porch, and a door opening upon the 
hall ; next, a broad living-room or kitchen, with its 
generous chimney, and this flanked by a wash room, 
or scullery, from which a second outer door opens 
upon the southern front. To this latter door, which 
may have its show of tubs, tins, and drying mops, a 
screen of shrubbery gives all needed privacy from the 
street, and separates by a wall of flowering things 
from the modest pretensions of the entrance by the 
porch. At least, such was an available part of the 
design. If the good woman's poultry, loving so sunny 
a spot, will worry away the rootlets of the lower 
flowering shrubs, and leave only a tree or two for 
screen, it is an arrangement of the leafy furniture, 
over which the successive occupants have entire con- 
trol. The noticeable fact is, that the best face of the 
cottage, and its most serviceable openings, whether 
of window or door, are given to the full flow of the 
sun, and not to the road side. What is the road 
indeed, but a convenience ? Why build at it, or 
toward it, as if it were sovereign, or as if we owed it 
a duty or a reverence ? We owe it none ; indeed, 
under the ordering of most highway surveyors, we 
owe it only contempt. But the path of the sun, and 
of the seasons, is of God's ordering ; and a south win- 
dow will print on every winter's morning a golden 
prayer upon the floor ; and every summer's morning 




94 MY FARM. 

the birds and bees will repeat it, among the flowers at 
the southern door. 



Farm Buildings, 

"AVTNTG looked after the farm cottage, I come 
now to speak of the equally homely subject of 
barns and outbuildings. Of these, such as they were, 
I found abundance upon the premises, standing at all 
imaginable angles, and showing that extraordinary 
confusion of arrangement for Avhich many of our old- 
fashioned farmers have a wonderful aptitude. Should 
they all be swept away, and a new company of build- 
ings erected ? The stanch timbers and the serviceable 
condition of many of them forbade this, as well as 
considerations of prudence. Besides which, I have no 
admiration for that incongruity which often appears 
at the hands of those who are suddenly smitten with 
a love for the country — of expensive and jaunty farm 
architecture in contrast with a dilapidated farm. I 
believe in a well-conditioned harmony between farm 
products and the roofs that shelter them, and that 
both should gain extent and fulness, by orderly pro- 
gression. It has chanced to me to see here and there 
through the country very admirable appliances of 
machinery and buildings, which, on the score of both 
cost and needfulness, were out of all proportion to the 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 95 

fertility and the order of the fields. I see, too, not 
unfrequently, very showy palings in the neighbor- 
hood of a country house, which are flanked by the 
craziest of slatternly fences ; whereat it always occurs 
to me, that the expenditure would be far better dis- 
tributed in giving a general neatness and effectiveness 
to all the enclosures, rather than lavished upon a little 
spurt of white splendor about the house. A fertility 
too gross for the buildings, so as to bubble over in 
ricks and temporary appliances, is to me a far more 
cheery sight agriculturally, than buildings so grand as 
utterly to outmatch and overshadow all productive 
capacity of the land. A kernel too big for the nut, 
promises to my taste a better relish than a nut too big 
for the kernel. 

These seem to me, at the worst, very plausible 
reasons, if there had been no final, prudential ones, 
for making the best of the old buildings at hand — by 
re-arrangement, new grouping, and by shutting up 
such gaps between the disjointed parts, as should 
reduce the whole to a quadrangular order, and offer 
sunny courts for the cattle. 

If a sunny exposure, and grateful shelter from 
harsh winds be good for the temper of the farm wife 
and her household, they are even better for all the 
domestic animals ; and it is an imperative condition 
of the arrangement of all farm buildings in our cli- 



96 MY FARM. 

mate that they offer a sheltering lee, and have their 
principal openings, specially of windows, to the south. 
Protection against summer heats, if needed for stalled 
animals, it is easy to supply ; but an equivalent for 
the warmth of the winter's sun, I know no name for. 

Another condition of all judicious arrangement, 
which is even more important, is such disposition of 
the yards and cellars, as shall prevent all waste of ma- 
nurial resources of whatever kind, whether by undue 
exposure, or by leakage. And in this connection, T 
may mention that it is a question seriously mooted, 
and worthy of full investigation — if the fertilizing 
material of a farm will not warrant special shelter as 
fully as the crops. All experience certainly confirms 
the fact that such as is taken from under cover, pro- 
vided only the moisture is sufficient, is worth the 
double of that which has been exposed to storms. 
What chemical laws relating to agriculture confirm 
this fact, I may have occasion to speak of in another 
chapter ; at present I note only the results of practical 
observation, without reference to underlying causes. 

The books would have recommended me to con- 
struct an extensive tank, to which drains should con- 
duct all the wash from the courts and stables. But 
this would involve water carts, and other appliances, 
liable to injury under rough handling; besides de- 
manding a nicety of tillage, and a regularity of dis- 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 97 

tribution which, at first, could not be depended on. 
That the liquid form is the one, under which manurial 
material under a complete system of culture, will work 
the most magical results, I have no doubt. But until 
that system is reached, very much can be done in the 
way of economizing the fertilizing elements of the 
farmyard, short of the tank and the water cart ; and 
this by modes so simple, and at an expense so small, 
as to be within the reach of every farmer. 

Let me illustrate, in the plainest possible manner, 
by my own experience. The barn, as I have said, 
was slatternly ; it had yielded a little to the pinching 
northwesters, and by a list (as seamen say) to the south- 
east, gave threat of tumbling upon the cattle yard. 
This yard lay easterly and southerly, in a ragged, 
stony slope, ending on its eastern edge with a quag- 
mire, which was fed by the joint wash of the yard 
and the leakage of a water trough supplied from a 
spring upon the hills. The flow from this quagmire, 
unctuous and fattening, slid away down a long slope 
into the meadow, — at first so strong, as to forbid all 
growth ; then feeding an army of gigantic docks and 
burdocks ; and after this giving luxuriant growth to 
a perch or two of stout English grass. But it was a 
waste of wealth ; it was like a private, staggering 
under the rations of a major-general. I cut off the 

rations. With the stones which were in and about 
5 



93 MY FARM. 

the yard, I converted its lazy slope into two level 
courts ; and so arranged the surface, that the flow 
from the upper should traverse the lower one ; from 
which, in turn, the joint flow of fertilizing material 
fell though a few tiles in the lower terrace wall, upon 
the head of a long heap of compost, which was or- 
dered to be always replaced, as soon as removed. 
The leakage of the water trough being cured, its 
overflow was conducted to the pasture below, where 
the second overflow, — for the stream was constantly 
running, — would do no injury, and would be available 
as a foraging mudpool for the ducks. By this sim- 
ple re-adjustment of surface, and of the water flow, I 
have no question but I fully doubled the yearly value 
of the manures. 

I still further mended matters by carrying the 
cow stables along all the northern frontier of the 
yard, in such sort as to afford an ample sunny lee ; 
and extending this new pile of building over the 
eastern terrace wall, I gained an open cellar below for 
my store pigs, who range over the ground where the 
burdocks so thrived before, with occasional furtive 
examinations of the compost heap which receives the 
flow from above. 

I do not name this disposition of buildings and of 
surfaces, as one to be copied, or as the one which I 
should have chosen to make, in the event of a thor- 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 99 

ough reconstruction ; but only as one of those simple, 
feasible improvements of the old conditions which 
are met with everywhere ; improvements, moreover, 
which involve little or no cost, beyond the farmer's 
own labor, and no commitment to the theories of 
Mechi or of Liebig. A ragged-coated man should be 
grateful for a tight bit of linsey-wolsey to his back, 
until such time as he comes to the dignity of broad- 
cloth. 

Four fifths of those who undertake farming, — not 
as an amusement or simply as an occupation, but as the 
business of their life, and upon whom we are depend- 
ent for our potatoes, veal, and cider (to say nothing 
more), — are compelled to do the best they can with 
existing buildings ; and Stephens' plans of a 4 farm- 
steading ' are as much Greek to them, as the ' Works 
and Days ' of Hesiod. A hint, therefore, of judicious 
adaptation of old buildings, may be all they can digest 
with that practical relish with which a man accepts 
suggestions that are within the compass of his means 
and necessities. 

Again, the British or Continental needs in the 
matter of farm constructions, are totally different 
from American need, in all northern latitudes. The 
British farmer can graze his turnips into January ; 
and I have seen a pretty herd of Devon cows cropping 
a fair bite of grass, under the lee of the Devon Tors, 



100 MY FARM. 

• 

into February. "We, on the contrary, have need to 
store forage for at least six months in the year. Hay 
begins to go out of the bays with the first of Novem- 
ber at the latest, and there is rarely a good bite upon 
the pastures until the tenth of May. For this reason 
there is required a great breadth of barn room. 

The high cost of labor, too, forbids that distribu- 
tion of the farm offices over a considerable area of 
surface, which is characteristic of the British stead- 
ing. The tall buildings, which are just now so much 
in vogue with enterprising American farmers, situated 
by preference upon swiftly sloping land, and giving an 
upper floor for forage, a second and lower one for 
granary and cattle, and a third for manure pit, have 
been suggested and commended chiefly for their great 
economy of labor ; one man easily caring for a herd, 
under these conditions of lodgment, which upon the 
old system would demand two or three. 

Machinery, too, which must presently come to do 
most of the indoor work upon a well-managed farm 
of any considerable size, will require for its effective 
service compact buildings. 

Let me repeat the conditions of good American 
barns. They must suffice for ample protection of the 
harvested crops ; ample and warm shelter for the ani- 
mals ; security against waste of manurial resources ; 
and such compactness of arrangement as shall war- 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 101 

rant the fullest economy of labor. With these ends 
reached, they may be old or new, irregular or quad- 
rangular — they are all that a good farmer needs in the 
way of architecture, to command success. 

The Cattle. 

M "T~YXHAT sort o' cattle d'ye mean to keep, 
y Y Squire ? " said one of my old-fashioned 
neighbors, shortly after my establishment. " Squire " 
used to be the !N*ew England title for whatever man, 
not a clergyman or doctor, indulged in the luxury of 
a black coat occasionally, upon work days. But in 
these levelling times, I am sorry to perceive that it is 
going by ; and I only wear the honor now, at a long 
distance from home, in the ' up-country.' 

To return to the cattle ; my neighbor's question 
was a pertinent one. Not what cattle did I admire 
most, or what cattle I thought the finest ; but what 
cattle shall I keep ? 

In this, as in the matter of the house, of the out- 
buildings and of the roadway, I believe thoroughly in 
adaptation to ends in view. If I had been under- 
taking the business of a cattle breeder, I should 
have sought for those of the purest blood, of what- 
ever name ; if I had counted upon sales to the 
butcher, my choice would have been different; if, 



102 MY FARM. 

again, butter had been the aim, I am sure I should 
have made no great mistake in deciding for the sleek 
Jersey cattle. But for mere supply of milk, under 
ordinary conditions of feeding, I do not know that 
any breed has as yet established an unchallenged 
claim to the front rank. The Devons, Ayrshires, and 
Shorthorns, each have their advocates ; for the lati- 
tude and pasturage of New England, if I were com- 
pelled to choose between the three, I should certainly 
choose the Ayrshires ; but I am satisfied that a more 
successful milk dairy can be secured by a motley herd 
of natives, half-bloods, and animals of good promise 
for the pail, than by limitation of stock to any one 
breed. I am confirmed in this view by the examples 
of most large dairies of this country, as well as by 
many in Great Britain. I particularly remember a 
nice little herd which I had the pleasure of seeing, 
some years since, at the excellently managed farm of 
Glas-Nevin in the environs of Dublin : sleek animals 
all, and thoroughly cared for ; but showing a medley 
of races ; the queen milker of all — as it chanced — 
having lineage in which the Ayrshire, the Shorthorn 
and Devon were all blended. 

T know there are very many cattle fanciers, and 
stanch committee men, who will not approve this 
method of talking about mixed stables, and of a 
medley of different races, — as if a farmer were at liber- 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 103 

ty to make his choice of cattle, with the same coolness 
with which he would make his choice of ploughs or 
wagons, and to tie up together, if the humor takes 
him, animals which the breeders have been keeping 
religiously apart for a few score of years. 

But I do not share in this punctiliousness. I be- 
lieve that these animals all, whether of the Herd-book 
or out of it, must be measured at last, not by their 
pedigree or title, but by their fitness for humble farm 
services. A family name may be a good enough test 
of any animal — biped or other — from whom we look 
for no particular duty, save occasional exhibition of 
his parts before public assemblages ; but when our 
exigencies demand special and important service, we 
are apt to measure fitness by something more in- 
trinsic. 

The cattle breeders are unquestionably doing 
great benefit to the agricultural interests of the coun- 
try ; but the essential distinction between the aims 
of the breeder and farmer should not be lost sight of. 
The first seeks to develop, under the best possible 
conditions of food and shelter, those points in the ani- 
mal which most of all make the distinction of the 
race. The farmer seeks an animal, or should, which 
in view of climate, soil, and his practice of husbandry, 
shall return him the largest profit, whether in the 
dairy, under the yoke, or in the shambles. He haa 



104 MY FARM. 

nothing to do with points, but the points that shall 
meet these ends. There is no reason why he should 
limit himself to one strain of blood, unless that strain 
meets and fills every office of his farm economy, any 
more than he should narrow his poultry range to pea- 
fowl, or to golden pheasant. 

I think I may have talked somewhat in this strain 
to my old neighbor, who asked after the " squire's 
cattle " — but not at such a length ; and I think that 
he offered some such corollary as this : 

" Squire, them English cows is handsome critturs 
enough to look at ; but ye have to keep a follerin' on 
'em up with a meal tub." 

It is very easy to lay down a charming set of rules 
for the establishment of a good herd (and for that 
matter — of a good life) ; but — to follow them ? 

I will be bound to say that there was never a pret- 
tier flock of milch cows gathered in any man's stables 
than the superior one which I conjured up in my 
fancy, after an imaginative foray about the neighbor- 
hood. But it was not easy to make the fancy good. 
Mr. Flint, in his very capital book upon milch cows 
and dairy farming, gives a full elucidation of that 
theory of M. Guenon, by which the milking properties 
of an animal can be determined by what is called the 
escutcheon, — being certain natural markings, around 
the udder upon the inner parts of the thighs. It is 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 105 

perhaps needless to say, that such minute observation 
as would alone justify a decision based upon this the- 
ory, might sometimes prove awkward, and embar- 
rassing. Upon the whole, I should counsel young 
farmers in summer clothing, and away from home, 
to judge of a cow by other indicia. 

Still, the theory of M. Guenon* has its value ; and 
I am persuaded that he was worthily adjudged the 
gold medal at the hands of the Agricultural Society 
of Bordeaux. But with this, and all other aids — 
among which I may name the loose preemptory reflec- 
tions and suggestions of certain adjoining farmers — I 
was by no means proud of the appearance of the little 
herd of twelve or l&urteen cows with which opera- 
tions were to commence. 

The popular belief, that all jockeyism and cheatery 
is confined to horse dealings, is too limited. Whoever 
will visit the cow stables in Robinson street, or near 
to Third avenue, upon a market day, may observe a 
score or two of animals with painfully distended ud- 
ders (the poor brutes have not been milked in the last 
forty-eight hours), throwing appealing glances about 
the enclosure, and eyeing askance certain bullet-headed 
calves, which are tied in adjoining stalls, but which 

* The interested agricultural reader may consult " Choix des 
Vaches Laitieres, par M. Magne, Paris," for full exhibition of the 
Bjstem. 

5* 



106 MY FARM. 

have no more claim upon the maternal instincts of 
the elder animals, than the drovers themselves. It is 
all a bald fiction ; the true offspring have gone to the 
butchers months ago ; and if the poor, surcharged 
brutes accept of the offices of the little staggering 
foundlings, it is with a weary poke of the head, that 
is damning to the brutality of the drovers. 

It would be too much to say that I have never 
been deceived by these people ; too much to say that 
honest old gentlemen of innocent proclivities did never 
pass upon me certain venerable animals, with the tell- 
tale wrinkles rasped out of their horns. One of this 
class, of a really creditable figure, high hip bones, 
heavy quarters, well marked milk veins, I was incau- 
tious enough to test by a glance into her mouth. 
Not a tooth in her old head ! 

I looked accusingly at the rural owner, who was 
quietly cutting a notch in the top rail of his fence. 

" Waal, yes — kinder rubbed off; but she bites 
pooty well with her gooms." 

Among the early purchases, and among the ani- 
mals that promised well, was a dun cow, which it was 
found necessary, after a few weeks of full feeding, to 
cumber with a complicated piece of neck furniture, to 
forbid her filching surreptitiously what properly be- 
longed to the paiL Self-milkers are not profitable. I 
have faith in the doctrine of rotation, and the quick 



TAKING REINS IN HAND. 107 

reconversion of farm products into the elements of 
new growth. But here was a case of reconversion 
so rapid, as to be fatal to all the laws of economy. It 
suggested nothing so strongly, as that rapid issue of 
government money, which finds immediate absorption 
among the governmental officials. Does the govern- 
ment really milk itself ; and can no preventive be 
found in the way of neck machinery, or other ? 

Another animal was admirable in every point of 
view ; I found her upon one of the North River 
wharves, and the perfect outline of her form and 
high-bred action, induced a purchase, even at a long 
figure ; but the beast proved an inveterate kicker. 

The books recommend gentleness for the cure of 
this propensity ; so does humanity ; I concurred with 
both in suggesting that treatment to Patrick. 

" Gintle is it ? And bedad, sir, she's too ould for 
a cure. I'm thinking we must tie her legs, sir ; but 
if ye orders it, bedad, it's meself can be gintle. 

" Soh, Moolly — soh — soh (and a kick) ; soh, ye 
baste (a little livelier), soh (and a kick) — soh, blast 
ye ! — soA, Moolly — soh, Katy — SOH (and a crash) ; 
och, you ould baste ye — take that ! " and there is a 
thud of the milking stool in the ribs. 

The " gintleness " of Patrick is unavailing. But 
the cow is an excellent animal, and not to be hastily 
discarded. Milker after milker undertook the con- 



108 MY FARM. 

quest, but with no better success. The task became 
the measure of a man's long-suffering disposition ; 
some gave over, and lost their tempers before the first 
trial was finished ; others conjured down the spirit 
by all sorts of endearing epithets and tenderness, 
until the conquest seemed almost made ; when sud- 
denly pail, stool, and man would lapse together, and 
a stream of curses carry away all record of the ten- 
derness. We came back at last to Patrick's original 
suggestion ; the legs must be tied. A short bit of 
thick rope passed around one foot and loosely knot- 
ted, then passed around the second and tied tightly 
in double knot, rendered her powerless. There was 
a slight struggle, but it was soon at an end ; and she 
made no opposition to the removal of the thong after 
the milking was over. With this simple provision, 
the trouble was all done away ; and for a whole year 
matters went well. But after this, there came a re- 
former into control of the dairy. The rope was bar- 
barous ; he didn't believe in such things ; he had seen 
kicking cows before. A little firmness and gentle- 
ness would accomplish the object better ; God didn't 
make cows' legs to be tied. The position was a 
humane one, if not logical. And the thong was dis- 
carded. 

"Well Patrick," said I, two days after, "how 
fares the cow ? " 



TAKING REIN'S IN HAND. 109 

" And begorra, it's the same ould baste, sir." 

A few days later I inquired again after the new 
regimen of gentleness and firmness. 

" Begorra," said Patrick, " she's kicked him 
again ! " 

A week passed ; and I repeated the inquiries. 

" Begorra, she's kicked him again ! " screamed 
Patrick ; " and it's a divil's own bating he's been 
giving the ould baste." 

Sure enough, the poor cow was injured sadly ; 
her milking days were over ; and in a month she 
went to the butcher. And this advocate of gentle- 
ness and firmness was one of the warmest and most 
impassioned philanthropists I ever met with. 

The moral of the story is, — if a cow is an inveterate 
kicker, tie her legs with a gentle hand, or kill her. 
Beating will never cure, whether it come in successive 
thuds, or in an explosive outbreak of outrageous vio- 
lence. I suspect that the same ruling is applicable to 
a great many disorderly members of society. 

Although the cases I have cited were exceptional, 
and although my little herd had its quiet, docile, 
profit-giving representatives, yet I cannot say that it 
was altogether even with my hopes or intentions. 

Two stout yoke of those sleek red cattle, for 
which southern New England is famous, had their 
part to bear in the farm programme, besides a sleek 



110 MY FARM. 

young Alderney bull, and a pair of sturdy horses. 
There were pigs with just enough of the Suffolk blood 
in them to give a shapely outline, and not so much as 
to develop that red scurfy baldness, which is to my 
eye rather an objectionable feature of high breeding 
and feeding — whether in men or pigs. 

Ducks, turkeys, and hens, in a fluttering brood, 
brought up the rear. With these all safely bestowed 
about the farm buildings which I have briefly indi- 
cated, and with a rosy-nosed, dapper little Somerset- 
shire man, who wore his tall Sunday-beaver with a 
slight cant to one side, established as lieutenant-gov- 
ernor in the cottage, the reins seemed fairly in hand. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 



III. 

CROPS AND PROFITS. 



The Hill Land. 

BEFORE we keep company farther — the reader 
and I — let me spread before him, as well as I 
may, a map of the farm land. I may describe it, in 
gross, as a great parallelogram, intersected by the 
quiet public highway, which divides it into two great 
squares. The eastern square is, for the most part, as 
level as the carpet on my library floor, and its crops 
make checkers like the figures on the ingrain. The 
eastern half is toward the town ; and upon its edge, 
by the highway, are the farm buildings I have 
grouped around the stone cottage. The western 
half is rolling ; and beyond the whitey-gray farm- 
house, with which I entered upon my portraiture, it 
heaves up into a great billow of hill, half banded 
with woodland, and half green with pasture. 



114 MY FARM. 

This billow of hill, dipped down between 1 ay- 
home and the stone cottage, into a little valley, 
which I have transmuted, as before described, into a 
lawn of grass land, with its clumps of native trees 
and flowering shrubs, and its little pool, under the 
willows, that receives the drainage. Elsewhere, 
beyond, and higher, its surface was scarred with 
stones of all shapes and sizes ; orderly geology 
would have been at fault amid its debris ; — there were 
boulders of trap, with clean sharp fissures breaking 
through them ; — there were great flat fragments of 
gneiss covered with gray lichens ; — there were pure 
granitic rocks worn round, — perhaps by the play of 
some waves that have been hushed these thousand 
years ; and there were exceptional fragments of 
coarse red sandstone, frittered half away by centu- 
ries of rain, and leaving protruding pimples of harder 
pebbles. In short, Professor Johnston, who advised 
(in Scotland) the determination of a farm purchase 
by the character of the subjacent and adjoining 
rocks, would have been at fault upon my hillside. A 
short way back, amid the woods, he would have 
found a huge ridge of intractable serpentine ; the 
boulders he would have discovered to be of most 
various quality ; and if he had dipped his spade, 
aided by a pick, he would have found a yellow, fer- 
ruginous conglomerate, which the rains convert into 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 115 

a mud that is all aflow, and which the suns bake into 
a surface, that with the sharpest of mattocks would 
start a flood of perspiration, before he had combed a 
square yard of it into a state of garden pulverization. 

Lying above this, however, was a vegetable 
mould, with a shiny silicious intermixture (what pre- 
cise people would call a sandy loam), well knitted 
together by a compact mass of the roots of myrtles, 
of huckleberry bushes, and of ferns. Geologically, 
the hill was a ' drift ; ' agriculturally, considering the 
steep slopes and the matted roots, it was uninviting ; 
pictorially, it was rounded into the most graceful of 
cumulated swells, and all glowing with its wild ver- 
dure ; practically, it was a coarse bit of neglected 
cow-pasture, witli the fences down, and the bushes 
rampant. 

What could be done with this ? It is a query 
that a great many landholders throughout New Eng- 
land will have occasion some day to submit to them- 
selves, if they have not done so already. Overfeed- 
ing with starveling cows, and a lazy dash at the brush 
in the idle days of August, will not transform such 
hills into fields of agricultural wealth. Under such 
regimen they grow thinner and thinner. The annual 
excoriation of the brush above ground, seems only to 
provoke a finer and firmer distribution of the roots 
below ; and the depasturing by cows — particularly 



U6 MY FARM. 

of milch animals, folded or stalled at night — will 
gradually and surely diminish the fertilizing capi- 
tal of such grazing land. It is specially noticeable 
that the deterioration under these conditions, is 
much more marked upon hill lands than upon level 
meadows.* 

In the back country, such old pastures with their 
brush and scattered stones, will feed sheep profit- 
ably, and will grow better under the cropping. 
But in the immediate neighborhood of towns, where 
every barkeeper has his half dozen dogs, and every 
Irish family their cur, and every vagabond his canine 
associate, sheep can only be kept at a serious risk of 
immolation for the benefit of these worthies. Proper 
legislation might interpose a bar, indeed, to such 
sacrifice of agricultural interests, — if legislation were 
not so largely in the hands of dog-fanciers. 

The sheep are not the only sufferers. 

Shall the hill be ploughed ? It is not an easy 
task to lay a good furrow along a slope of forty-five 
degrees, with its seams of old wintry torrents, its 
occasional boulders, and its matted myrtle roots ; 
and, if fairly accomplished, the winter's rains may 
drive new seams from top to bottom, carrying the 
light mould far down under walls, and into useless 

* This is perhaps more apparent than real, from the fact that 
upon level lands the droppings are more evenly distributed. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 117 

places, — leaving harsh yellow scars, that will defy 
the mellowest June sunshine. 

A city friend, with city aptitude, suggests — ter- 
races ; and instances the pretty ones overhung with 
vines, which the traveller may see along the banks 
of the Rhine. . 

I answer kindly ; and in the same vein — suggest 
that such scattered rocks, as are not needed, 
may be thrown into the shape of an old watch 
tower — with Bishop Hatto's for a model — to mimic 
the Rhine ruins. 

" Charming ! and when the grapes are ripe, 

drop me a line." And my city friend plucks a bit of 
penny-royal, and nips it complacently. 

Terracing might be done in a rude but substantial 
way, at the cost of about fifteen hundred dollars the 
acre. This might do at Johannisberg ; but hardly, in 
a large way, in Connecticut. Crops must needs be 
exceeding large upon such terraces, to compete suc- 
cessfully with those of a thriving ' forehanded ' man, 
who farms upon a land capital of less than a hundred 
dollars to the acre. 

I abandoned the design of terraces. And yet, 
there are times when I regale myself for hours 
together, with the pleasant fancy of my city friend. 
His terraces should be well lichened over now ; and 
I seem to see brimming on the successive shelves 



118 MY FARM. 

of the hill, great festoons of vines, spotted with 
purple clusters ; amidst the foliage, there gleams, 
here and there, the broad hat of some vineyard 
dresser (as in German pictures), and crimson kirtles 
come and go, and songs flash into the summer still- 
ness, and a soft purple haze wraps the scene, and 
thickens in the hollows of the land, and swims 
fathoms deep around the ruin 

" Square, what d'ye ask apiece for them suck- 
ers ? " 

It is my neighbor, who has clambered up, holding 
by the myrtle bushes, to buy a pig. 

The vexed question of the proper dressing 
and tillage of the hillside, is still in reserve. I 
resolved it in this wise : — Of the rocks most con- 
venient, and least available for fencing purposes, 
I constructed an easy roadway, leading by grad- 
ual inclination from top to bottom ; other stones 
were laid up in a substantial wall, which sup- 
plies the place of a staggering and weakly fence, 
which every strong northwester prostrated ; still 
others, of a size too small for any such purpose, were 
buried in drains, which diverted the standing moist- 
ure from one or two sedgy basins on the hill, and 
discharged the flow upon the crown of a gravelly 
slope. There, I have now the pleasure of seeing a 
most luxuriant growth of white clover and red top. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 119 

fertilized wholly by the flow of water which was only 
harmful in its old locality. I next ordered, in the 
leisurely time of later autumn, the grubbing up of 
the patches of myrtles and briers, root and branch ; 
these with the mossy turf that cumbered them, after 
thorough drying, were set on fire, and burned slum- 
berously, with a little careful watching and tending, 
for weeks together. I was thus in possession of a 
comparatively smooth surface, not so far disinte- 
grated as to be subject to damaging washes of storm, 
besides having a large stock of fertilizing material in 
the shape of ashes. 

In the folio wing spring, these were carefully 
spread; a generous supply of hay-seed sown, and still 
further, an ample dressing of phosphatic guano. The 
hillside was then thoroughly combed with a fine- 
toothed Scotch harrow, and the result has been a 
compact lively sod, and a richer bite for the cattle. 

Again, upon one or two salient points of the hill, 
where there were stubborn rocks which forbade 
removal, I have set little coppices of native ever- 
greens, which, without detracting in any appreciable 
degree from the grazing surface, will, as they grow, 
have charming effect, and offer such modicum of 
shade as all exposed pasture lands need. One who 
looked only to simple farm results, would certainly 
never have planted the little coppices, or hedged 



120 MY FARM. 

them, as I have done, against injury. But it appears 
to me that judicious management of land in the 
neighborhood of large towns, should not ignore 
wholly, the conservation of those picturesque effects, 
which at no very remote time, may come to have a 
marketable value, greater even than the productive 
capacity of the soil. 

I have even had the hardihood to leave upon cer- 
tain particularly intractable spots of the hill land, 
groups of myrtles, briers, scrubby oaks, wild grapes, 
and birches, to tangle themselves together as they 
will, in a wanton savagery of growth. Such a 
copse makes a round perch or two of wilderness 
about the sprawling wreck of an old cellar and 
chimney, which have traditional smack of former 
Indian occupancy; and the site gives color to 
the tradition; — for you look from it southeasterly 
over three square miles of wavy meadows, through 
which a river gleams ; and over bays that make good 
fishing ground, and over a ten-mile reach of shim- 
mering sea. A little never-failing spring bubbles up 
a few yards away ; and to the westward and north- 
ward, the land piles in easy slope, making sunny shel- 
ter, where, — first on all the hillside, — the snow van- 
ishes in Spring. The Indian people had a quick eye 
for such advantages of position. 

In still further confirmation, I have turned up an 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 121 

arrow-head or two in the neighborhood, chipped 
from white quartz, and as keen and sharp as on the 
day they were wrought. 

I am aware that what are called * tidy farmers ' 
would have brushed away these outlying copses, no 
matter what roughnesses they concealed ; but I sus- 
pect their rude autumn clippings with a bush-hook, 
would only have provoked a spread of the rootlets ; 
and if effectual, would have given them only a bit 
of barrenness. 

Up-country farmers are overtaken from time to 
time, with what I may call a spasmodic tidiness, 
which provokes a general onslaught with bill-hooks 
and castaway scythes, upon hedge rows and wayside 
bushes, and pasture thickets, — without considering 
that these thickets may conceal idle stone heaps or 
decrepid walls, which are as sightless as the extermi- 
nated bush ; and their foray leaves a vigorous crop 
of harsh stubs, which, with the next season, shoot up 
with more luxuriance than ever, and leave no more 
available land within the farmer's grasp than before. 
Wherever it is profitable to remove such wild growth, 
it is profitable to exterminate it root and branch. 
Half doing the matter is of less worth than not doing 
it at all. But it is well to consider before entering 
upon such a campaign, if the end will justify the la- 
bor ; and if the recovered strips of land will carry re- 
6 



122 MY FARM. 

munerative crops. If otherwise, let the wild growth 
enjoy its wantonness. It may come to be a little 
scattered range of wood in time, and so have its 
value ; it may offer shelter against the sweep of 
winds ; it will give a nursing place for the birds, — and 
the birds are the farmer's friends. 

I am loth to believe that the natural graces of 
woodland and shrubbery are incompatible with agri- 
cultural interests ; and a true farm economy seems to 
me better directed in making more thorough the 
tillage of the open lands, than in making Quixotic 
foray upon the bushy fastnesses of outlying pastures. 

When a dense population shall have rendered ne- 
cessary the employment of every foot of our area for 
food-growing purposes, it may be incumbent on us to 
cleave all the rocks, and to clear away all the copses : 
but until then, I shall love to treat with a tender con- 
sideration the green mantle — albeit of brambles and 
wild vines — with which Nature covers her rough- 
nesses ; and I seem to see in the streaming tendrils, 
and in the nodding tassels of bloom which bind and 
tuft these wild thickets of the hills, a sampler of 
vegetable luxuriance, which every summer's day 
provokes and defies all our rivalry of the fields. 

What is called tidiness, is by no means always 
taste ; and I am slow to believe that farm economy 
must be at eternal war with grace. I know well that 



CROPS AM) PROFITS. 123 

no inveterate improver should ever tempt me tc 
extirpate the dandelions from the green carpet oi 
my lawn, or to cut away the wild Kalmia bush 
which in yonder group among the rocks, is just now 
reddening into its crown of blossoms. 



The Farm Flat. 

T is a different matter with the eighty acres of 
meadow which lie stretched out in view from 
my door. There, at least, it seemed to me, must be 
a clean, clear sweep for the furrows. Yet I remem- 
ber there were long wavy lines of elder-bushes, and 
wild-cherries, groping beside the disorderly divid- 
ing fences. There were weakly old apple-trees, with 
blackened, dead tops, and with trunks half concealed 
by thickets of dwarfish shoots ; there were triplets 
of lithe elms, and hickory trees, scattered here 
and there; — in some fields, stunted, draggled cedar 
bushes, and masses of yellow-weed ; — a little patch of 
ploughed-land in the corner of one enclosure, and a 
waving half acre of rye in the middle of the next. 
The fences themselves were disjointed aDd twisted, 
— the fields without uniformity in size, and with no 
order in their arrangement. 

" I think we must mend the look of these mead- 
ows, Coombs ? " 



124 MY FARM. 

And the dapper Somersetshire man, with his hat 
defiantly on one side — " Please God, and I think we 
will, sir." 

I must do him the justice to say that he was 
as good as his word. In looking over the scene 
now, I find no straggling cedars, no scattered shoots 
of elms ; the wayward elders, and the wild -cherries 
save one protecting and orderly hedgerow along the 
northern border of the farm — are gone. The de- 
crepid apple-trees are rooted up, or combed and 
pruned into more promising shape. Ten-acre fields, 
trim and true, are distributed over the meadow land, 
and each, for the most part, has its single engrossing 
crop. 

As I look out from my library window to-day — 
and the learned reader may guess the month from 
my description — I see one field reddened with the 
lusty bloom of clover, which stands trembling in 
its ranks, and which I greatly fear will be doubled 
on its knees with the first rain storm ; another shows 
the yellowish waving green of full-grown rye, sway- 
ing and dimpling, and drifting as the idle winds 
will ; another is half in barley and half in oats — a 
bristling green beard upon the first, the oats just 
flinging out their fleecy, feathery tufts of blossom ; 
upon another field, are deep dark lines beneath 
which, in September, there are fair hopes of harvest- 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 12 5 

ing a thousand bushels of potatoes ; yet another, 
shows fine lines of growing corn, and a brown area, 
where a closer look would reveal the delicate growth 
of fresh-starting carrots and mangel. All the rest 
in waving grass ; not so clean as could be wished, 
for I see tawny stains of blossoming sorrel, and fields 
whitened like a sheet, with daisies. 

If there be any cure for daisies, short of a clean 
fallow every second year, I do not know it ; at least, 
not in a region where your good neighbors allow 
them to mature seed every year, and stock your fields 
with every strong wind, afresh. 

Heavy topdressing is recommended for their 
eradication, but it is not effective ; so far as I can 
see, the interlopers, if once established, enjoy heavy 
feeding. A rye crop is by many counted an exter- 
minator of this pest ; but it will find firm footing 
after rye. Thorough and clean tillage, with a sys- 
tem of rotation, afford the only security. 

It is not Bums' " wee-tipped " daisy that is to be 
dealt with ; it is a sturdier plant — our ox-eye daisy 
of the fields ; there is no modesty in its flaunting air, 
and the bold uplift of its white and yellow face. 

I never thought there was a beauty in it, until, on 
a day— years ago— after a twelvemonth's wandering 
over the fields of the Continent, I came upon a little 
pot of it, under the wing of the Madeleine, on the 



126 MY FARM. 

streets of Paris. It was a dwarfish specimen, and 
the nodding blossoms (only a pair of them) gave a 
modest dip over the edge of the red crock, as if they 
felt themselves in a country of strangers. But it 
was the true daisy for all this, and I greeted it with 
a welcoming franc of purchase money, and carried it 
to my rooms, and established it upon my balcony, 
where, while the flower lasted, I made a new Pic- 
ciola of it. And as I watered it, and watched its 
green buttons of buds unfolding the white leaflets, 
wide visions of rough New England grasslands 
came pouring with the sunshine into the Paris win- 
dow, and with them, — the drowsy song of locusts, — 
the gushing melody of Bob-o'-Lincolns, — until the 
drum-beat at the opposite Caserne drowned it, and 
broke the dream. 

These living and growing souvenirs of far-away 
places, carry a wealth of interest and of suggestion 
about them, which no merely inanimate object can 
do. I have flowers fairly pressed, not having wholly 
lost their color, which I plucked from the walls of 
Rome, and others from a house-court of the buried 
Pompeii ; but they are as dead as the guide books 
that describe the places. 

It is different wholly with a little potted Ivy 
which a friend has sent from the walls of Keuil- 
worth. It clambers over a rustic frame within the 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 127 

window — a tiny, but a real offshoot of that great 
mass of vegetable life which is flaunting over the 
British ruin ; a little live bubble as it were, from that 
stock of vitality which is searching all the crannies of 
the masonry that belongs to the days of Elizabeth. 

I never look at it in times of idle musing, but its 
shiny leaflets seem to carry me to the gray wreck of 
castle : and the tramp through the meadows from 
Leamington comes back — the wet grass, the gray 
walls, the broad-hatted English girls, hovering with 
gleeful laughter about the ruin, and the flitch of 
bacon hanging in the gatekeeper's house. Other- 
times, the dainty tendrils of the vine lead me still 
farther back ; and Leicester, Amy Robsart, Essex, 
and Queen Bess with her followers, and all her 
court, — come trooping to my eye in the trail of this 
poor little exiled creeper from Kenilworth. 

But this is not farming. 

" Coombs," said I, " what shall we plant upon 
the flat ? " — not that I had no opinion on the subject, 
but because in farming, there is a value in the sug- 
gestions of every practical worker. 

The Somersetshire man leans his head a little, as 
if considering : — " We must have some artificial, sir, 
— for the cows— Mangel or pale Belgians, — both 
good, sir ; some oats for the 'osses, sir ; potatoes, sir. 
is a tidy crop — " 



128 MY FARM. 

I observe that Englishmen and Scotchmen are 
disposed to slight our standard crop of maize. They 
do not understand it. They fail of making a cred- 
itable show in comparison with the old-school native 
farmers, who, by dint of long experience, have 
acquired the habit (rather habit than capacity) of 
making a moderate crop of corn with the least pos* 
sible amount of tillage and of skill. To turn over a 
firm grass sward, and plant directly upon the in- 
verted turf, without harrowing, or ridging, or drill- 
ing, is contrary to all the old-country traditions. 

And yet the fact is notorious, that some of the 
best corn crops (I do not speak now of exceptional 
and premium crops), are grown in precisely this 
primitive way ; given a good sod, and a good top- 
dressing turned under — with, perhaps, a little dash of 
superphosphate upon the hills to quicken germina- 
tion, and give vigorous start, — and the New England 
farmer, if he give clean and thorough culture — 
which, under such circumstances, involves little labor 
— can count upon his forty or fifty bushels of sound 
corn to the acre. And the Scotchman or Englishman 
may tear the sod, or ridge the field, or drill it, or 
torment it as he will, before planting, and the 
chances are, he will reap, with the same amount of 
fertilizers, a smaller harvest. And it is precisely this 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 129 

undervaluation of his traditional mode of labor, that 
makes him show a distaste for the crop. 

Corn is a rank grower, and, very largely, a sur- 
face feeder ; for these reasons, it accommodates 
itself better than most farm crops, to an awkward 
and careless husbandry — provided only, abundance 
of gross fertilizers are present, and comparative 
cleanliness secured. It is not a crop which I should 
count a valuable assistant in bringing the sandy loam 
of a neglected farm into a condition of prime fer- 
tility. It has so rank an appetite for the inorganic 
riches of a soil, as to forbid any accumulation of that 
valuable capital. Nor do I clearly perceive how, in 
the neighborhood of large towns, and upon light soils, 
it can be made a profitable crop at the East. It has 
a traditional sanctity, to be sure ; and a great many 
pleasant old gentlemen of New England, who count 
themselves shrewd farmers, would as soon think of 
abandoning their heavy ox-carts, or of adopting a 
long-handled shovel, as of abandoning their yearly 
growth of corn. 

I think I have given the matter a fair test, not- 
withstanding the objections of my Somersetshire 
friend, and have added to my own experience, very 
much observation of my neighbors' practice. And I 
am very confident that if only a fair valuation be 
placed upon the labor and manures required, that any 
6* 



130 MY FARM. 

average corn crop grown upon light soils at the East, 
will cost the producer four years out of five, ten per 
cent, more than the market price of the Western 
grain. In this estimate, I make due allowance for 
the value of the stalks and blades for forage. 

I shall enter into no array of figures for the sake 
of proving this point ; figures can be made to prove, 
or seem to prove so many things. And however 
clearly the fact might be demonstrated, there are 
two classes at least, upon whom the demonstration 
would have no effect ; the first being those over- 
shrewd old men, who keep unflinchingly to their 
accustomed ways, counting their own labor for little 
or nothing (in which they are not far wrong) ; and 
the other class consisting of those retired gentlemen 
who bring so keen a relish for farming to their work, 
that they rather enjoy producing a crop at a cost of 
twice its market value. I heartily wish I were able 
to participate in such pleasant triumphs. 

But if the economy of maize growing for the 
grain product be questionable, there can be no ques- 
tion whatever of cultivating the crop as a forage 
plant, for green cutting, and for soiling purposes. 
In no way can a full supply of succulent food be fur- 
nished more cheaply for a herd of cows, during the 
heats of August and September. For this object, I 
have found the best results in drilling eighteen 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 131 

inches apart, upon inverted sod, thoroughly manured ; 
to insure successive supplies, the sowing should be 
repeated at intervals of a month, from the twentieth 
of April to the twentieth of July. A later sow- 
ing than this last, will expose the blades to early 
frosts. 

The amount of green food which can be cut from 
an acre of well-grown corn is immense ; but let no 
one hope for successful results, without a most 
ample supply of manure, and clean land. The prac- 
tice has fallen into disfavor with many, from the 
fact that they have given all their best fertilizers to 
other crops, and then made the experiment of grow- 
ing corn-fodder with a flimsy dressing, and no care. 
They deserved to fail. It is to be observed more- 
over, that as the crop matures no seed, it makes 
little drain upon the mineral wealth of the land, and 
can be followed by any of the cereals. This suggests 
a simple and short rotation: First, corn — grown for its 
blades and stalks only (the first cuttings being suc- 
ceeded by turnips) : Second, carrots, Mangel, or pota- 
toes : Third, oats or other cereal : and Fourth, clover 
with grass seeds, to be mown so long as the interests 
of the dairy or the land may demand. 

A professed grain-grower, or an English farmer, 
would smile at such an unstudied rotation ; but I 
name it in all confidence, as one adapted to dairy 



]32 MY FARM. 

purposes, upon lands which need recuperation. It is, 
in fact, a succession of two fallow crops, and with 
proper culture and dressings, will insure accumulat- 
ing fertility. 

Such a simple course of green cropping is, more- 
over, admirably adapted to the system of soiling, 
which, upon all light and smooth lands, adapted to 
dairy purposes, in the neighborhood of towns, must 
sooner or later become the prevailing method ; and this, 
— because it is economic, — because it is sure, and be- 
cause it supplies fourfold more of enriching material 
than belongs to any other system. I am not writing 
a didactic book, or offering any challenge to the 
agricultural critics (who, I am afraid, are as full of 
their little jealousies as the literary critics), — else I 
would devote a full chapter to this theory of soiling, 
and press strongly what I believe to be its advan- 
tages. 

The reader is spared this ; but he must pardon 
me a little fanciful illustration of the subject, in 
which I have sometimes indulged, and which may, 
possibly, at a future day, become real. 

An Illustration of Soiling. 

FROM the eighty-acre flat below — so like a car- 
pet, with its checkered growth — I order every 
line of division fence to be removed ; the best of the 



CROPS AND PROFITS 133 

material being kept in reserve for making good the 
border fences, and the remainder cut, split, and piled 
for the fire. The neighbors, who cling to the old 
system of two-acre lots, and pinched door-yards, 
open their eyes and mouths very widely at this. 
The novelty, like all novelties in a quiet country 
region, is at once astounding and oppressive. As if 
the parish parson were suddenly to come out in the 
red stockings of a cardinal, or a sober-sided select- 
man to appear on the highway without some import- 
ant article of his dress. 

I fancy two or three astute old gentlemen lean- 
ing over the border fence, as the work of demolition 
goes on. 

" The Squire ' s makin' this ere farm inter a pa- 
rade-ground, a'n't he ? " says one ; and there is a 
little, withering, sarcastic laugh of approval. 

Presently, another is charged with a reflection 
which he submits in this shape : " Ef a crittur breaks 
loose in sich a rannge as that, I raether guess he'll 
have a time on't." And there is another chirrupy 
laugh, and significant noddings are passed back and 
forth between the astute old gentlemen — as if they 
were mandarin images, and nodded by reason of the 
gravity of some concealed dead weight — (as indeed 
they do). 

A third suggests that " there woant be no great 



134 MY FARM. 

expense for diggin' o' post holes," which remark is 
so obviously sound, that it is passed by in silence. 

The clearance, however, goes forward swim- 
mingly. The new breadth which seems given to the 
land as the dwarfish fields disappear one after 
another, develops a beauty of its own. The Yellow- 
weeds, and withered wild-grasses, which had clung 
under the shelter of the fences, even with the best 
care, are all shorn away. The tortuous and irregu- 
lar lines which the frosts had given to the reeling 
platoons of rails, perplex the eye no more. 

Near to the centre of these opened fields is a 
great feeding-shed, one hundred feet by forty, its 
ridge high, and the roof sloping away in swift pitch 
on either side to lines of posts, rising eight feet only 
from the ground. The gables are covered in with 
rough material, in such shape as to leave three sim- 
ple open arches at either end ; the middle opening, — 
high and broad, so that loaded teams may pass 
beneath ; the two flanking arches, — lower, and open- 
ing upon two ranges of stalls which sweep down on 
either side the building. These stalls are so dis- 
posed that the cattle are fed directly from cartb 
passing around the exterior. Behind either range of 
cattle is a walk five feet broad ; and between these 
walks, — an open space sixteen feet wide, traversing 
the whole length of the building, and serving at once 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 135 

as manure pit, and gangway for the teams which 
deposit from time to time their contributions of 
muck and turf. Midway of this central area is a 
covered cistern, from which, as occasion demands, 
the drainage of the stalls may be pumped up to 
drench the accumulating stock of fertilizing material. 
This simple building, which serves as the summer 
quarters of the dairy, is picturesque in its outline ; 
for I know no reason why economy should abjure 
grace, or why farm construction should be uncouth 

or tawdry. 

A small pasture-close, with strong fencing— 
with gates that will not swag, and with abundance 
of running water, supplied from the hills, serves as 
an exercising ground for the cows for two hours 
each day. Othertimes, throughout the growing sea- 
son, they belong in the open and airy stalls. The 
crops which are to feed them, are pushing luxuri* 
antly within a stone's throw of their quarters. An 
active man with a sharp scythe, a light horse-cart 
and Canadian pony, will look after the feeding of a 
herd of fifty, with time to spare for milking and stall 

cleaning. 

From the tenth of May to the first of June, per- 
haps nothing will contribute so much to a full flow 
of milk, as the fresh-springing grass upon some out- 
lying pasture on the hills. After this, the cows may 



136 MY FARM. 

take up their regular summer quarters in the build 
ing I have roughly indicated. From the first to the 
renth of June, there may be heavy cuttings of winter 
rye ; from the tenth of June to the twentieth, the 
lucerne (than which no better soiling crop can be 
found) is in full season ; after the twentieth, clover 
and orchard grass are in their best condition, and 
retain their succulence up to the first week in July, 
when, in ordinary seasons, the main reliance — maize 
which was sown in mid- April, is fit for the scythe. 
Succeeding crops of this, keep the mangers of the 
cows full, up to an early week in October. After- 
ward may come cuttings of late-sown barley, or the 
leaves of the Mangel, or carrot-tops, with which, as 
a bonne bouche, the cattle are withdrawn to their 
winter quarters, for their dietary of cut-feed, oil-cake, 
occasional bran and roots. 

They leave behind them in their summer banquet- 
ing house, a little Rhigi of fertilizing material — not 
exposed to storms, neither too dry nor too moist, and 
of an unctuous fatness, which will make sundry sur- 
rounding fields, in the next season, carry a heavier 
burden than ever of purple Mangel, or of shining 
maize-leaves. 

I perceive, too, very clearly, in furtherance of the 
illustration, that one acre will produce as much nu- 
tritive food, under this system, as four acres under 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 137 

the old plan of waste — by poaching — and by expos- 
ure of all manurial material to the fierce beat of the 
sun, and to the washings of rain storms. I perceive 
that the land, as well as cattle, are all fairly in hand, 
and better under control. If at any time the season, 
or the market, should indicate a demand for some 
special crop, I am not disturbed by any apprehension 
that this or that enclosure may be needed for graz- 
ing, and so, bar the use. I perceive that a well-regu- 
lated system must govern all the farm labor, and 
that there will be no place for that looseness of 
method, and carelessness about times and details, 
which is invited by the old way of turning cattle 
abroad to shirk for themselves. 

No timid team will be thrashed, in order to wipe 
the fence posts with the clattering whiffletree, at the 
last bout around the headlands. There will be no 
worrying of the Buckeye in old and weedy corners ; 
not a reed or a Golden-rod can wave anywhere in 
triumph. The eye sweeps over one stretch of luxu- 
riant field, where no foot of soil is wasted. The 
crops, in long even lines, are marked only by the 
successive stages of their growth, and by their color- 
ing. There are no crooked rows, no gores, no gath- 
erings. 

If the reader has ever chanced to sail upon a 
summer's day up the river Seine, he will surely re* 



138 MY FARM. 

member the beautiful checker-work of crops, which 
shine, in lustrous green, on either bank beyond the 
old Norman city of Rouen. Before yet the quaint 
and gorgeous towers of the town have gone down in 
the distance, these newer beauties of the cleanly cul- 
tivated shore-land challenge his wonder and admira- 
tion. I name the scene now, because it shows a cul- 
tivation without enclosures ; nothing but a traditional 
line — which some aged poplar, or scar on the chalk 
cliff marks, — between adjoining proprietors ; a belt 
of wheat is fringed with long-bearded barley ; and 
next, the plume-like tufts of the French trefoil, 
make a glowing band of crimson. A sturdy peas- 
ant woman, in wooden sabots, is gathering up a 
bundle of the trefoil to carry to her pet cow, under 
the lee of the stone cottage that nestles by the river's 
bank. 

And I indulge my fancy with the idea of some 
weazen-faced New England farmer looking down 
upon all this from some shattered loop-hole of the 
wrecked chateau Gaillard, and saying — " Gosh, ef a 
crittur were to break loose, I guess they'd have a 
time on't." 

There are some things we New England farmers 
have not learned yet. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 139 

An Old Orchard. 

A CERTAIN" proportion of mossy, ragged orch- 
arding belongs to almost every New Eng- 
land farm. My own, in this respect, was no exception ; 
if exceptional at all, the exception lay in the fact 
that its orcharding was less ragged and mossy than 
most ; the trees were also, many of them, grafted 
with sorts approved twenty years ago. Eight acres 
of a somewhat gravelly declivity, were devoted to 
this growth, of which four were in apple trees, two 
in cherries, and two in pears. Intervals of two acres 
each, on either side the cherries, of unoccupied land, 
were in the old time planted respectively with plums 
and peaches. Of these, only a few ragged stumps, 
or fitful and black-knotted shoots, remained. Their 
life as well as their fruitfulness had gone by ; and I 
only knew of them through the plaintive laments of 
many an old-time visitor, who tantalized me with his 
tales of the rare abundance of luscious stone-fruits, 
which once swept down the hillside. 

The whole enclosure of twelve acres had relapsed 
into a wild condition. The turf was promiscuously 
an array of tussocks of wild-grass, dwarfed daisies, 
struggling sorrel, with here and there a mullein 
lifting its yellow head, and domineering over the 
lesser wild growth. Occasional clumps of hickory, 



140 MY FARM. 

or of wild-cherry, had shot up, and exhibited a 
succulence and vigor which did not belong to the 
cultivated trees. 

And now I am going to describe fully — keeping 
nothing back — the manner in which I dealt with this 
wilderness of orchard. It was not in many respects 
the best way ; but the record of errors in so experi- 
mental a matter, often carries as good a lesson as the 
record of successes. This is as true in state-craft as 
with old orcharding. 

First, I extirpated every tree which was not a 
fruit tree — with the exception of one lordly sugar 
maple at the foot of the declivity, and standing 
within one of the unoccupied belts. Its stately, 
compact head, shading a full half acre of ground, 
still crowns the view. I am aware that it is an agri- 
cultural enormity. The mowers complain that the 
broken limbs, torn down by ice storms, are a pest ; 
the tenant complains of its deep shade ; one or two 
neighboring sawyers have made enticing proposi- 
tions for its stalwart bole, yet I cannot forego my 
respect for its united age and grace. 

With this exception, I made full clearance, and 
turned under, by careful ploughing, all the wild sod. 
I dressed the whole field heavily with such fertilizers 
as could be brought together, from home resources 
and from town stables, with certain addenda of lime 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 141 

and phosphates. I removed all trees in a dying con- 
dition, of which there were at least twenty per cent, 
of the gross number ; I pruned away all dead limbs, 
all interlacing boughs, and swamps of shoots from 
the roots. The mosses, cocoons, and scales of old 
bark were carefully scraped from the trunks and 
larger limbs, which were then washed thoroughly 
with a strong solution of potash. Even at this stage 
of the proceedings, I felt almost repaid by the air of 
neatness and cleanliness which the old orchard wore ; 
and I am sorry to say that in regard to very many 
of the trees, it was all the repayment I have ever 
received. 

Among the apple trees was a large number of 
that old favorite, the Newtown pippin ; and these, 
I am sorry to say, were the most mossy and dilapi- 
dated of all ; nor did they improve. No scrapings 
or primings tempted them to any luxuriance of 
growth. One by one they have been cut away, until 
now only two remain. The nurserymen tell us that 
the tree is not adapted to the soil and climate of 
New England. I can confirm their testimony with 
unction. 

There was, also, a stalwart company of trees 
bearing that delightful little dessert fruit — the Lady 
apple. And I think my pains added somewhat to 
their thrift ; they are sturdy, and full of leaves every 



142 MY FARM. 

summer; and every Ma)', in its latter days, sees 
them a great pyramid of blooming and blushing 
white. But after the bloom, the beauty is never 
fully restored. There is fruit indeed, but small, 
pinched, pierced with curculio stings, bored through 
and through with the worm of the apple-moth ; and 
over and above all, every apple is patched with a 
mouldy blight which forbids full growth, and gives 
it, with its brilliant red cheek, a falsified promise of 
excellence. I have found in the books no illustration 
of this peculiar distemper which attacks the Lady 
apple ; but in my orchard, in the month of Novem- 
ber, the illustrations abound. 

The Esopus Spitzenberg, that red, spicy bit of 
apple-flesh, had its representatives among the old 
trees which came under my care ; I may give it the 
credit of showing grateful cognizance of the labor 
bestowed. The trees thrived ; they are thrifty now ; 
the bloom is like that of a gigantic, out-spread 
Weigelia. The fruit too (such as the curculio 
spares), is full and round ; but there is not a speci- 
men of it which is not bored through by the inevit- 
able grub of the apple-moth. 

Besides the varieties I have particularized, there 
were the Tallman and Pound Sweetings sparsely 
represented ; and the Rhode Island Greening, which, 
I will fairly admit, has made a better struggle 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 143 

against adverse influences, than any winter fruit I 
have named. So fair a struggle, indeed, that if I 
could only forego the visitations of the curculio and 
of the moth, I might hope for an old-time fulness of 
crop. The Strawberry apple, by reason, I think, of 
its early maturity (and the same is true of the Red 
Astrachan), has shown a more kindly recognition of 
care than the later fruits. The moth, if it attacks, 
does not destroy it. I count upon its brilliant color- 
ing, and its piquant acidity in the first days of 
August, as surely as I count upon the rains which 
follow the in-gathering of the hay. There remained 
a few trees of various old-fashioned sorts, such as the 
Fall-Pippin, the Pearmain, the Cheseborough Rus- 
set, and the black Gilliflower, which have shown 
little thrift, and borne no fruit of which a modest 
man would be inclined to boast. 

In short, there appeared so little promise of 
eminent results, that after two or three years I gave 
over all special culture of the majority of the trees, 
and devoting the land to grass, left them to struggle 
against the new sod as they best could. Fruit 
growers and nursery men will object that the trial 
was not complete ; and they will, with good reason, 
aver that no fruit trees can make successful struggle 
against firmly rooted grass. From all tilled crops, 
within whose lines there are spaces of the brown 



144 MY FARM. 

soil subject to the dews and atmospheric influences, 
trees will steal the nourishment ; but grass, with its 
serried spear-blades covering the ground, steals from 
the tree. An open fallow with crops in the inter- 
vals, would certainly, if sustained for a period of 
years, have contributed far greater thrift than the 
trees now possess. But an open fallow is no protec- 
tion against the curculio and the apple moth. If 
there be a protection so simple, and of such propor- 
tions as to admit of its application to a marketable 
crop, I am not yet informed of it. A few worthy 
old gentlemen of my acquaintance, catch a few mil- 
lers in a deep-necked bottle, baited with molasses, 
which is hung from the limbs of some favorite tree 
overshadowing their pig-pen ; and they point with 
pride to the results. I certainly admire their suc- 
cesses, but have not been tempted to emulate them, 
on the extended scale which the mossy orchard 
would have afforded. 

Some persistent amateurs and pains-taking gentle- 
men do, I know, succeed in making the young fruit 
of a few favorite plum trees distasteful to the cur- 
culio, by repeated ejections of a foul mixture of 
tobacco and whale-oil soap, — by which the tree has 
a weekly bath, and an odor of uncleanness. But in 
view of a large orchard, where apples make a leafy 
pyramid measured by cubic yards, and cherries carry 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 145 

their fine fruit sixty feet in the air, there would be 
needed a projectile of dirty water that would rival 
Alderman Mechi's, of Tip-tree Hall. 

It is far easier to accomplish successful results 
with an old orchard of native, wild growth, than 
with one of grafted fruit ; — even as the Doctors find 
that a reprobate who has fallen away from grace and 
early good conduct, is a worse subject for reforma- 
tion, than an unkempt savage. 

The grafted tree wants an abounding luxuriance 
of material, from which to elaborate its exceeding 
size and flavor ; and if by neglect, this material be 
wanting, the organs of its wonderful living labora- 
tory shrink — from inaction, and part with a share of 
their vitality. The native tree, on the other hand, 
having no special call upon it for the elaboration of 
daintier juices than go to supply a cider vat, has 
steady normal development under all its mosses, and 
retains a stock of reserved vitality, which, if you 
humor with good tillage and dressings, and point 
with good grafts, will carry a good tale to the apple 
bin. 

On the very orchard I have named, were some 
two or three uncouth, lumbering, unpromising trees, 
yet sound as a nut to their outermost twigs, which 
the simple dressings, tillage, and washings that were 
bestowed somewhat vainly upon the others, quick- 



14 6 MY FARM. 

ened into a marvellous luxuriance ; and the few 
shoots I set upon them are now supplying the best 
fruit of the orchard. Even these, however, are not 
free from the pestilent stings which the swanns of 
winged visitors inflict upon every crop. 

It is very questionable if ploughing is, upon the 
whole, the best way of reinstating a neglected and 
barren orchard. It is a harsh method ; trees strug- 
gling to keep up a good appearance under adverse 
circumstances — like men — use every imaginable shift ; 
their little spongiole feeders go off on wide search ; 
they are multiplied by the diversity of labor ; and 
the plough cuts into them cruelly, making crude 
butcher work where the nicest surgery is demanded. 
I am inclined to believe that a deep trench, sunk 
around each tree, at the distance of from eight to ten 
feet from the trunk, and filled with good lime com- 
post, is the surest way of redeeming a neglected 
orchard. Even then, however, the turf should be 
carefully removed within the enclosed circle, that the 
air and its influences may have penetrative power 
upon the soil. The method is Baconian (fodiendo et 
aperiendo terram circa radices ipsarum) ; it is 
thorough, but it is expensive ; and a farmer must 
consider well — if his trees, soil, market, and the 
populousness of the insect world will warrant it. 

For my own part, so far as regards a market crop 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 147 

of winter fruit, I have decided very thoroughly in 
the negative. Not that it cannot be grown with 
sufficient care ; but that it can be grown far more 
cheaply, and of a better quality, in other regions. 
Summer fruit is not so long exposed to the depreda- 
tions of insects, nor will it bear distant transporta- 
tion. Its freshness too, gives it a virtue, and a 
relishy smack, which warrant special pains-taking. 

I find in an old book of Gervase Markham's, 
" The Countrie Farme " (based upon Liebault), that 
the apple tree " loveth to have the inward part of his 
wood moist and sweatie, so you must give him his 
lodging in a fat, black, and moist ground ; and if it 
be planted in a gravelly and sandie ground, it must 
be helped with watering, and batling with dung and 
smal moulde in the time of Autumne. It liveth and 
continueth in all desirable good estate in the hills 
and mountains where it may have fresh moisture, 
being the thing that it searcheth after, but even 
there it must stand in the open face of the South." 

The ruling is good now, with the exception per- 
haps of exposure to the South, in regions liable to 
late spring frosts. And whatever may be the advan- 
tages of soil and of position, let no man hope for 
large commercial results in apple-growing at the 
East, without reckoning upon as thorough and as- 
siduous culture as he would g^ive to his corn crop ; — 



148 MY FARM. 

as well as a constant battle with the borers and bark 
lice, — intermittent campaigns against the caterpillar 
and canker worm, and a great June raid upon the 
whole guerilla band of curculios. 

The cherries, a venerable company of trees, have 
borne the scrapings and dressings with great equa- 
nimity, — being too old to be pushed into any wanton 
luxuriance, and too sedate to show any great exhil- 
aration from the ammoniacal salts. Pruning is not 
much recommended in the books ; yet I have suc- 
ceeded in restoring a good rounded head of fruit- 
bearing wood by severe amputation of begummed 
and black-stained limbs ; this is specially true of the 
Black-hearts and Tartarians, — of many of which I 
have made mere pollards. 

It is a delicate fruit to be counted among farm 
crops, and hands used to the plough are apt to 
grapple it too harshly. Pliny says it should be eaten 
fresh from the tree ; and it is as true of our best 
varieties, as it was of the Julian cherry in the first 
century. It will not tolerate long jogging in a coun- 
try wagon ; it will not " keep over " for a market; 
and between these drawbacks, and the birds — who 
troop in flocks to the June feast, — and the boy 
pickers — who take toll as they clinib,— and the out- 
standing twigs, which shake defiance to all ladders 
and climbers — I think he is a fortunate man who 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 149 

can market from forty-year-old trees, one bushel in 

three. 

Of the position for a cherry orchard, and of its 
likings in the way of soil and climate, nothing better 
can be said, than Palladius wrote fourteen centuries 
a<*o : " Oerasus amat colli statum frigidum, solum 
vero positionis humectce. In tepidis regionibus parva 
movenit. Calidum non potest sustinere. Montana, 
vel in collibus constituta regione Icetatur," *— which 
means that — cherries want a cool air and moist land. 
Heat hurts them, and makes them small, and they 
delight in a hilly country. 

The Pears. 

THE condition of the pears was far worse than 
that of either cherries or apples. Had they 
been seedlings of the native fruit, they would have 
shown more stalwart size, and better promise from 
good treatment. There was, I remember, a long 
weakly row of the Madeleine, shrouded in lichens, 
and with their lank, frail limbs all tipped with dead! 
wood. It is an enticing fruit, by reason of its early 
ripening, and its pleasant sprightly flavor; but its 
persistent inclination to rot at the core, in most soils, 
makes it a very unprofitable one. I forthwith cu{ 

* Lib. xi.. Tit. 12. 



150 MY FARM, 

away their dying, straggling tops, and by repeated 
diggings about the roots, stimulated a growth of 
new wood, upon which luxuriant grafts are now (six 
years after commencement of operations) bearing 
full crops of more approved varieties. The Jargo- 
nelles were almost past cure. Long struggle with 
neglect had nearly paralyzed their vegetative power ; 
but by setting a few scions of such rank growers as 
the Buffum upon the most promising of the purple 
shoots, I have met with fair success. The Jargo- 
nelle itself, I may remark in passing, seems to me 
not fitly appreciated in the race after new French 
varieties. It has a juiciness, a crispness, and a vinous 
flavor, which, however scorned by the later pomolo- 
gists, are exceedingly grateful on a hot August 
day. 

There was a great rank of Virgouleuse (white 
Doyenne) — pinched in their foliage, with bark 
knotted like that of forest trees, and bearing only 
cracked, meagre, woody fruit. For ISTew England it 
is a lost variety. Happily, however, its boughs take 
grafts with great kindliness ; and I have now the 
pleasure of seeing fair full heads upon every one of 
these out-lived stocks, of the Bartlett, Flemish 
Beauty, Bonne de Jersey, and Lawrence. 

There were not a few Buffum trees in the ranks, 
which were in a state of most extraordinary dilapi- 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 151 

datioii ; their trunks white with moss, their upright 
shoots completely covered with a succession of 
crooked, gnarled, mossy fruit spurs, that crinkled 
under the scraper like dried brambles ; the extremity 
of every upright bough was reduced to a shrivelled 
point of blackened and sun-dried wood, and the fruit 
so dwarfed as to puzzle the most astute of the po- 
mologists. 

I made a clean sweep of the old fruit spurs, 
— docked the limbs, — scraped the bark to the quick, 
— washed with an unctuous soapy mixture, — dug 
about and enriched the roots, and in three years' 
time, there were new leading shoots, all garnished 
with fresh fruit spurs — which, in September fairly 
broke away with the weight of the glowing pears. 

The Seckels, of which there were several trees, 
have not come so promptly ' to time.' The fer- 
tilizers and the cleaning process, which have given 
rampant vigor to the Buffums, have scarce lent to the 
dwindled Seckels any appreciable increase of size or 
of succulence. The same is true, in a less degree, of 
certain old stocks, grafted some fifteen years ago 
with Bonne de Jersey, and since left to struggle 
with choking mosses, and wild sod. 

It is unnecessary to enumerate all the varieties 
which I found stifling in my orchard, — from the 
bright little Harvest pear to the crimson-cheeked 



152 MY FARM. 

Bon-Chretien. Here and there I have religiously 
guarded some old variety of Sugar-pear, or of Berga- 
mot,— by reason of the pleasant associations of their 
names, and by reason of an old fashioned regard 
which I still entertain for their homeliness of flavor. 
I sometimes have a visit from a pear-fancier, who 
boasts of his fifty or hundred varieties, — who con- 
founds me with his talk of a Beurre St. Nicholas, or 
a Beurre of Waterloo, and a Doyenne Goubault, or a 
Doyenne Robin ; I try to listen, as if I appreciated 
his learning ; but I do not. My tastes are simple 
in this direction ; and I feel a blush of conscious 
humility when he comes upon one of my old-time 
trees, staggering under a load of fruit — which are 
not in the books. It is very much as if a gentleman 
of the Universities, full of his book lore, were to 
stroll into my library, — talking of his Dibdins, and 
Elzevirs, and Brunets ; — with what a blush I should 
see his eye fall upon certain thumb-worn copies of 
Tom Jones, or the Vicar of Wakefield, or Defoe ! 

Yet these gentlemen of the special knowledges 
have their uses — the pear-mongers with the rest. 
Not a season passes, but they discover and label for 
us a host of worthless varieties. I only object to the 
scornful way in which they ignore a great many 
established favorites, which people will persist in 
buying and eating. I remember that I once had the 



OR J PS AND PROFITS. 153 

hardihood, in a little group of pomological gentle- 
men, to express a modest opinion in praise of the 
flavor of the Bartlett pear. 

The gentlemen did not deign a reply ; but I was 
looked upon very much as a greenhorn might be, 
who at a political caucus should venture a word or 
two, in favor of — honesty. 

Quince stocks for pear trees have their advocates ; 
and there has been a very pretty war between the 
battlers for the standards, and the battlers for the 
dwarfs. Having made trial of both, and considering 
that most human opinions are fallible, I plant myself 
upon neutral ground, and venture to affirm that each 
mode of culture has its advantages. There are, for 
instance, varieties of the pear, which, in certain 
localities, will not thrive, or produce fair specimens, 
without incorporation upon the quince stock. Such, 
in my experience, are the Duchess d'Angouleme, and 
the Vicar of Winkfield. The finest fruit of the Belle 
Lucrative, and the Bonne de Jersey, I also invariably 
take from dwarf growth. 

The dwarf trees, however, demand very special 
and thorough culture ; if the season is dry, they 
must be watered ; if the ground is baked, it must be 
stirred. I look upon them as garden pets, which 
must be fondled and humored ; and like other pets, 
they are sure to be attacked by noxious diseases. 



154 MY FARM. 

They take the leaf-blight as easily as a child takes 
the mumps ; they are capricious and uncertain — 
sometimes repaying you for your care well ; and 
other times, dropping all their fruit in a green state, 
in the most petulant way imaginable. And worst of 
all, after two or three years of devoted nursing, 
without special cause, and with all their leaves 
laughing on them, some group of two or three 
together — suddenly die. 

Early bearing, and brilliant specimens favor the 
quince ; but hardiness, long life, and full crops favor 
the pear upon its own roots. If a man plant the 
latter, he must needs wait for the fruit. Mceris puts 
it very prettily in the Eclogue : — 

" Insere, Daphni, pyros : carpent tua poma nepotes." 

But if a man with only a few perches of garden, 
and with an aptitude for nursing, desires fruit the sec- 
ond or third year after planting, let him by all means 
— plant the dwarfs. Yet even then his success is un- 
certain, — particularly if he indulges in the "latest 
varieties." I am compelled to say that I have known 
several cautious old gentlemen, who — with a garden 
full of dwarf trees, — have been seen in the month of 
September, to slip into a fruit shop at the edge of 
evening, with suspicious-looking, limp panniers on 
their arms. Nay, — I have myself met them returning 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 155 

from such furtive errand, with a basket laden from 
the fruiterer's stock, carefully hidden under their 
skirts ; and I have gone my way — (pretending not to 
see it all), humming to myself, 

carpent tua poma nepotes ! 



Want of success in orcharding is more often 
attributable to want of care, than to any other want 
whatever. There are, indeed, particular belts of 
land which seem to favor the apple, — where, with 
only moderate cultivation, they are free from leaf 
blight, — comparatively free from insect depredators, 
and fruit with certainty. There are other regions, 
— and these, so far as I have observed, warm soils 
inclining to a sandy or gravelly loam, in which the 
apple does not show vigor, except under extraor- 
dinary attention, and in which the whole insect tribe 
seems doubly pestiferous. 

The pear is by no means so capricious ; it will 
thrive in a heavy loam ; it will thrive in light sand ; 
the borer does not attack its root; the caterpillar 
moth does not fasten its eggs (or very rarely) upon its 
twigs ; the apple-moth spares a large proportion of 
its fruit. But even the pear, without care and culti- 
vation, will disappoint ; and the farmer who neglects 
any crop, will find, sooner or later, that whatever is 
worth planting, is worth planting well ; whatever is 



156 MY FARM. 

worth cultivating, is worth cultivating well ; and 
that nothing is worth harvesting, that is not worth 
harvesting with care. 

My Garden. 

I ENTER upon my garden by a little, crazy, 
rustic wicket, over which a Virginia creeper has 
tossed itself into a careless tangle of festoons. The 
entrance is overshadowed by a cherry-tree, which 
must be nearly half a century old, and which, as it 
filches easily very much of the fertilizing material 
that is bestowed upon the garden, makes a weightier 
show of fruit than can be boasted by any of the 
orchard company. 

A broad walk leads down the middle of the gar 
den, — bordered on either side by a range of stout 
box, and interrupted midway of its length by a box- 
edged circle, that is filled and crowned with one cone- 
shaped Norway-Spruce. These lines, and this circlet 
of idle green, are its only ornamentation. Easterly 
of the walk is a sudden terrace slope, stocked with 
currants, raspberries, and all the lesser fruits, in a 
maze of lines and curves. Westward is a level 
open space, devoted to long parallel lines of garden 
vegetables. The slope, by reason of its surface 
and its crops, is subject only to fork-culture ; the 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 157 

western half, on the other hand, has the economy of 
deep and thorough trench-ploughing, every autumn 
and spring. 

Nor is this an economy to be overlooked by a 
farmer. Very many, without pretensions to that 
nicety of culture which is supposed to belong to spade 
husbandry alone, so overstock their gardens with 
confused and intercepting lines of fruit shrubbery, 
and perennial herbs, as to forbid any thorough action 
of the plough. By the simple device, however, of 
giving to the garden the shape of a long parallelo- 
gram, and arranging its trees, shrubbery, and walks, 
in lines parallel with its length, and by estab- 
lishing easy modes of ingress and egress at either 
end, the plough will prove a great economizer ; and 
under careful handling, will leave as even a surface, 
and as fine a tilth as follows the spade. I make this 
suggestion in the interest of those farmers who are 
compelled to measure narrowly the cost of tillage, 
and who cannot indulge in the amateur weakness of 
wasted labor. 

I have provided also a leafy protection for this 
garden against the sweep of winds from the north- 
west : northward, this protection consists of a wild 
belt of tangled growth — sumacs, hickories, cedars, 
wild-cherries, oaks — separated from the northern 
walk of the garden, by a trim hedge-row of hemlock- 



158 MY FARM. 

spruce. This tangled belt is of a spontaneous 
growth, and has shot up upon a strip of the neg- 
lected pasture-land, from which, seven years since, I 
trenched the area of the garden. Thus it is not only 
a protection, but offers a pleasant contrast of what 
the whole field might have been, with what the gar- 
den now is. I must confess that I love these savage 
waymarks of progressive tillage — as I love to meet 
here and there, some stolid old-time thinker, whom 
the rush of modern ideas has left in picturesque 
isolation. 

Time and again some enterprising gardener has 
begged the privilege of uprooting this strip of wild- 
ness, and trenching to the skirt of the wall beyond 
it ; but I have guarded the waste as if it were a 
crop ; the cheewits and thrushes make their nests 
imdisturbed there. The long, firm gravel-alley which 
traverses the garden from north to south, traverses 
also this bit of savage shrubbery, and by a latticed 
gate, opens upon smooth grass-lands beyond, which 
are skirted with forest. 

Within this tangle-wood, I have set a few graft- 
lings upon a wild-crab, and planted a peach or two — 
only to watch the struggle which these artificial 
people will make with their wild neighbors. And 
so various is the growth within this limited belt, that 
my children pick there, in their seasons, — luscious 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 159 

dew-berries, huckleberries, wild raspberries, bill- 
berries, and choke-cherries ; and in autumn, gather 
bouquets of Golden-rod and Asters, set off with crim- 
son tufts of Sumac, and the scarlet of maple boughs. 
And when' I see the brilliancy of these, and smack 
the delicate flavor of the wild-fruit, it makes me 
doubt if our progress is, after all, as grand as it 
should be, or as we vainly believe it to be ; and (to 
renew my parallel) — it seems to me that the old-time 
and gone-by thinkers may possibly have given us as 
piquant, and marrowy suggestions upon whatever 
subject of human knowledge they touched, as the 
hot-house philosophers of to-day. I never open, of a 
Sunday afternoon, upon the yellowed pages of 
Jeremy Taylor, but his flavor and affluence, and 
homely wealth of allusions, suggest the tangled wild 
of the garden — with its starry flowers, its piquant 
berries, its scorn of human rulings, its unkempt vig- 
or, its boughs and tendrils stretching heaven-ward ; 
and I never water a reluctant hill of yellowed 
cucumbers, and coax it with all manner of concen- 
trated fertilizers into bearing, — but I think of the 

elegant education of the dapper Dr. , and of 

the sappy, and flavorless results. 

To the westward of the garden, and concealing a 
decrepit mossy wall, that is covered with blackberry 
vines and creepers, is the flanking shelter of another 



180 MY FARM. 

hemlock hedge of wanton luxuriance. A city gar- 
den could never yield the breadth it demands ; but 
upon the farm, the complete and graceful protection 
it gives, is well purchased, at the cost of a few feet 
of land. ISTor is much time required for its growth ; 
five years since, and this hedge of four feet in 
height, by two hundred yards in length, was all 
brought away from the wood in a couple of market 
baskets. 

The importance of garden shelter is by no means 
enough considered. I do not indeed name my own 
method as the best to be pursued ; flanking buildings 
or high enclosures may give it more conveniently 
in many situations ; a steep, sudden hillside may give 
it best of all ; but it should never be forgotten that 
while we humor the garden soil with what the plants 
and trees best love, we should also give their foli- 
age the protection against storms which they covet ; 
and which, in an almost equal degree, contributes to 
their luxuriance. 

To the dwarf fruit, as well as to the grape, this 
shelter is absolutely essential ; if they are compelled 
to fortify against aggressive blasts, — they may do it 
indeed ; but they will, in this way, dissipate a large 
share of the vitality which would else go to the fruit. 
Young cattle may bear the exposure of winter, but 
they will be pinched under it, and take on a weazen 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 161 

look of age, and expend a great stock of vital energy 
in the contest. 



F.ine Tilth makes Fine Crops. 

WITH a good situation, the secret of success 
with garden crops, lies in the richness of 
the soil, and in its deep and fine tilth ; the last being 
far oftener wanting than the former. A farm crop 
of potatoes or even of corn, will make a brave 
struggle amid coarse nuggets of earth, if only fertil- 
izers are present ; but such fine feeders as belong to 
the garden can lay no hold upon them ; they want 
delicate diet. Farmers are often amazed by the 
extraordinary vegetable results upon the sandy soil 
of a city dooryard, which they would count com- 
paratively worthless ; not considering, that — aside 
from the shelter of brick walls, which make the sun 
do double duty — the productive capacity of such city 
gardens, lies very much in the extreme and almost 
perfect comminution of the soil. 

"What is true of garden earth, is true also of its 
fertilizers ; they must be triturated, fine, easily digest- 
ible. Masses of unbroken farm-yard material are 
no more suited to the delicate organization of gar- 
den-plants, than a roasted side of bacon is suited to 
a child's diet. They may struggle with it indeed. 



16 2 MY FARM. 

Possibly they may reduce it to subjection ; but their 
growth will be rank and flavorless, whatever size 
they may gain. 

It is a common mistake to suppose that garden 
products are good in proportion to their size. The 
horticultural societies have done great harm in bol- 
stering the admiration for mere grossness. Smooth- 
ness, roundness, perfect development of all the parts, 
and delicacy of flavor, are the true tests. I remem- 
ber once offering for exhibition a little tray of gar- 
den products, in which every fruit and vegetable — 
though by no means all they should have been — was 
perfect in outline, well developed, free from every 
sting of insect or excrescence, and of that delicate 
and tender fibre which belongs only to swift and 
unchecked growth ; yet my poor tray was over- 
slaughed entirely, by an adjoining show of monster 
vegetables, with warty excrescences, and of rank 
and wholly abnormal development. The committee 
would have been properly punished if they had been 
compelled to eat them. 

In the same way, and with equal fatuity, the 
societies for agricultural encouragement persist in 
giving premiums to — so called — fat cattle ; mere mon- 
sters — not of good, wholesome, muscular fibre, well- 
mottled — but mountains of adipose substance, which 
no Christian can eat, and which are only disposed of 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 103 

profitably, by serving as an advertisement to some 
venturesome landlord, from whose table the reeking 
fat goes to the soap-pot. 

Grossness does not absorb excellence, or even 
imply it — either in the animal or vegetable world. I 
have never yet chanced to taste the monstrosities 
which the generous Californians sometimes send us 
in the shape of pears ; but without knowing, I would 
venture the wager of a bushel of Bartletts, that one 
of our own, little, jolly, red-cheeked Seckels would 
outmatch them thoroughly — in flavor, in piquancy, 
and in vinous richness. 

Shall the flaunting Dahlia match us a Rose ? Yet 
the dahlia has its place too ; it gives scenic effect ; 
its tall stiffness tells in the distance ; but we have a 
thousand roses at every hand. 

I sometimes fear that this disposition to set the 
mere grossness of a thing above its finer qualities, is 
an American weakness. We do not forget, so often 
as we might to advantage — that we are a great 
people. That eagle which our Fourth of July 
orators paint for our delighted optics, dipping his 
wings in both oceans, is the merest buzzard of a 
bird, except he have more virtue in him than mere 
Bize. 



164 MY FARM. 

Seeding and Trenching. 

IF there is one fault above another in all the gar- 
dening books, it is the lack of those simplest of 
directions and suggestions, without which the novice 
is utterly at fault. Thus, we are told in what month 
to sow a particular seed — that it must have a loamy 
soil ; and are favored with some special learning in 
regard to its varieties, and its Linnaean classification. 

" Pat," we say, " this seed must be planted in a 
loamy soil." 

JPat, (scratching his head reflectively) : " And 
shure, isn't it in the garden thin, ye'd be afther 
planting the seed ? " 

Pat's observation is a just one ; of course we buy 
our seed to plant in the garden, no matter what soil 
it may love. The more important information in 
regard to the depth of sowing it, the mode of apply- 
ing any needed dressing, the requisite thinning, 
the insect depredators, and the mode of defeat- 
ing them — is, for the most part, withheld. That the 
matter is not without importance, one will under- 
stand who finds, year after year, his more delicate 
seeds failing, and the wild and attentive Irishman 
declaring, — 

" And, begorra thin, it's the ould seed." 

" But did you sow it properly, Patrick ? " 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 165 

" Didn't I, faith ? I byried 'em an inch if I 
byried 'em at all." 

An inch of earth will do for some seeds, but for 
others, it is an Irish burial — without the wake. 

The conditions of germination are heat, air, and 
moisture. Covering should not be so shallow as to 
forego the last, nor so deep as to sacrifice the other 
essential influences. Heat alone will not do ; air and 
moisture alone will not do. A careful gardener will 
be guided by the condition of his soil, and the char- 
acter of his seed. If this have hard woody covering 
like the beet, he will understand that it demands 
considerable depth, to secure the moisture requisite 
to swell the kernel ; or that it should be aided by a 
steep, before sowing. If, on the other hand, it be a 
light fleecy seed, like the parsnip, he 'will perceive 
the necessity of bringing the earth firmly in contact 
with it. 

As a general rule, the depth of covering should 
not exceed two or three times the shortest diameter 
of the seed ; this plainly involves so light a covering 
for the lettuces, parsley, and celery, that a judicious 
gardener will cover by simply sifting over them a 
sprinkling of fine 16am, which he will presently wet 
down thoroughly (unless the sun is at high noon), 
with his water-pot — medicined with a slight pinch of 
guano. 



166 MY FARM. 

For a good garden, as I have said, a deep rich 
soil is essential; and to this end trenching is desir- 
able ; but trenching will not always secure it, for 
the palpable reason that subsoil is not soil. I hax e 
met with certain, awkward confirmatory experiences, 
— where a delicate garden mould of some ten inches 
in depth, which would have made fair show of the 
lesser vegetables, has been, by the frenzy of trench- 
ing, buried under fourteen inches of villainous 
gravelly hard-pan, brought up from below, in which 
all seeds sickened, and all plants turned pale. What- 
ever be the depth of tillage, it is essential that the 
surface show a fine tilth of friable, light, unctuous 
mould ; the young plants need it to gain strength for 
a foray below. And yet I have seen inordinate sums 
expended, for the sake of burying a few inches of 
such choice moulds, under a foot-thick coverlid of 
the dreariest and rawest yellow gravel that ever 
held its cheerless face to the sun. 

The amateur farmer, however, is not staggered by 
any such difficulties ; indeed, he courts them, and de- 
lights in making conquest. They make good seed-bed 
for his theories — far better than for his carrots. Let 
me do no discredit, however, to l trenching,' which 
in the right place, and rightly performed, by thor- 
ough admixture, is most effective and judicious ; nor 
should any thoroughly good garden be established 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 1G7 

upon soil which will not admit of. it, and justify it. 
If otherwise, my advice is, not to trench, but — sell to 
an amateur. 

How a Garden should Look. 

THE aesthetic element does not abound in the 
minds of country farmers ; and there is not 
one in a thousand who has any conception of a gar- 
den, save as a patch (always weedy) where the good- 
wife can pluck a few condiments for dinner. If you 
visit one, he may possibly take you to see a e likely 
yearling,' or a corn crop, but rarely to his garden. 
Yet there is no economic reason why a farmer's 
garden should not make as good and as orderly a 
show, as his field crops. 

A straight line is not greatly more difficult to 
make than a crooked one. The absurd borders, in- 
deed, where dirt is thrown into line, and beaten with 
a spade, is a mere caprice, which there is no need 
to imitate ; but the neatness which belongs to true 
lines of plants, regular intervals between crops, per- 
fect cleanliness, is another matter ; and is so feasible 
and so telling in effect, that no farmer has good ex- 
cuse for neglecting it. Effective groupings, again, of 
dwarf trees and fruit shrubbery, whether in rows, 
curves, or by gradations of size, give points of inter- 
est, and contribute to the attractions of a garden. 



168 MY FARM. 

It is not a little odd that the back-country gentle- 
man, who replies to all such suggestions, that he 
cares nothing for appearances — shall yet never ven- 
ture to a militia muster, or a town meeting, without 
slipping into the ' press ' for the old black-coat, and 
the black beaver (giving it a coquettish wipe with 
his elbow) — to say nothing of the startling shirt-col- 
lars, whose poise he studies before the keeping-room 
mirror. 

He contracts too for a staring white coat of paint 
upon his house and palings, and a mahogany-colored 
door, out of the same irresistible regard to " what 
people will say." But in all this, he does not do one 
half so much for the education of his children into a 
perception of order and elegance, as if he bestowed 
the same care upon the neatness of his yard and gar- 
den, where their little feet wander every day. 

It would be hard to estimate the educating effect 
of the gardens of the Tuileries and Luxembourg upon 
the minds of those artisans of Paris, who, living in 
garrets, and too poor for anything more than a little 
rustic tray of flowers upon their window ledge, are 
yet possessed of a perception of grace, which shines 
in all their handiwork. And if you transport them 
to the country — their own Auvergne or Normandy — 
they cannot, if they would, make slatternly gardens : 
they will not indeed repeat the brilliant tints of Paris 



CROP 8 AND PROFITS. 169 

flowers ; they cannot rival the variety ; but they can 
stamp lines of grace, and harmony of arrangement 
upon the merest door-yard of vegetables and pot- 
herbs. 

Here let me outline, in brief, what a farmer's 
garden may be made, without other than home-labor. 
A broad walk shall run down the middle of either a 
square enclosure, or long parallelogram. A box 
edging upon either side is of little cost, and contrib- 
utes eminently to neatness ; it will hold good for 
eight years, without too great encroachment, and at 
that time, will sell to the nurserymen for more than 
enough to pay the cost of resetting. On either side 
of this walk, in a border of six feet wide, the farmer 
may plant his dwarf-fruit, with grapes at intervals 
to climb upon a home-made cedar trellis, that shall 
overarch and embower the walk. If he love an 
evening pipe in his garden, he may plant some simple 
seat under one or more of these leafy arbors. 

At least one half the garden, as I before sug- 
gested, he may easily arrange, to till, — spring and 
autumn, — with the plough ; and whatever he places 
there in the way of tree and shrub, must be in lines 
parallel with the walk. On the other half, he will be 
subjected to no such limitations ; there, he will 
establish his perennials — his asparagus, his thyme, 
his sage, and parsley ; his rhubarb, his gooseberries, 
8 



170 MY FARM. 

strawberries, and raspberries ; and in an angie — hidden 
if he choose by a belt of shrubbery — he may have 
his hotbed and compost heap. Fork-culture, which 
all these crops demand, will admit of any arrange- 
ment he may prefer, and he may enliven the group- 
ings, and win the goodwife's favor, by here and 
there a little circlet of such old-fashioned flowers as 
tulips — yellow lilies and white, with roses of all shades. 

Upon the other half he may make distribution of 
parts, by banding the various crops with border lines 
of China or Refugee beans; and he may split the 
whole crosswise, by a walk overarched with climb- 
ing Limas, or the London Horticultural — setting off 
the two ends with an abutment of Scarlet-runners, 
and a surbase of fiery Nasturtium. 

There are also available and pretty devices for 
making the land do double duty. The border lines 
of China-beans, which will be ripened in early 
August, may have Swedes sown in their shadow in 
the first days of July, so that when the Chinas have 
fulfilled their mission, there shall be a new line of 
purple green in their place. The earlj radishes and 
salads may have their little circlets of cucumber pits, 
no way interfering with the first, and covering the 
ground when the first are done. The early Bassano 
beets will come away in time to leave space for the 
full flow of the melons that have been planted at 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 171 

intervals among them. The cauliflower will find 
grateful shade under the lines of sweet corn, and the 
newly-set winter cabbages, a temporary refuge from 
the sun, under shelter of the ripened peas. I do not 
make these suggestions at random, but as the results 
of actual and successful experience. 

With such simple and orderly arrangement, in- 
volving no excessive labor, I think every farmer and 
country-liver may take pleasure in his garden as an 
object of beauty ;— making of it a little farm in 
miniature, with its coppices of dwarf-trees, its hedge- 
rows of currants and gooseberries, and its meadows 
of strawberries and thyme. From the very day on 
which, in spring, he sees the first, faint, upheaving, 
tufted lines of green from his Dan-O'Rourkes, to 
the day when the dangling Limas, and sprawling, 
bloody tomatoes are smitten by the frost, it offers a 
field of constant progress, and of successive tri- 
umphs. Line by line, and company by company, the 
army of green things take position ; the little flowery 
banners are flung to the wind; and lo ! presently 
every soldier of them all — plundering only the earth 
and the sunshine — is loaded with booty. 

The Lesser Fruits. 

FROM the time when I read of Mistress Doctor 
Primrose's gooseberry wine, which the Doctor 
celebrates in his charming autobiography, I have 



172 MY FARM. 

entertained a kindly regard for that fruit. But my 
efforts to grow it successfully have been sadly 
baffled. The English climate alone, I think, will 
bring it to perfection. I know not how many ven- 
tures I have made with ' Roaring-Lion,' ' Brown 
Bob,' l Conquerors,' and other stupendous varie- 
ties ; but without infinite care, after the first crop — 
the mildew will catch and taint them. Our native 
varieties, — such, for instance, as the Houghton-seed- 
ling, make a better show, and with ordinary care, can 
be fruited well for a succession of seasons. But it is 
not, after all, the stanch old English berry, which 
pants for the fat English gardens, for the scent of 
hawthorn, and for the lowering fog-banks of Lan- 
cashire. 

Garden associations (with those who entertain 
them) inevitably have English coloring. Is it 
strange — when so many old gardens are blooming 
through so many old books we know ? 

~No fruit is so thoroughly English in its associa- 
tions ; and I never see a plump Roaring-Lion, but 
I think of a burly John Bull, with waistcoat strained 
over him like the bursting skin of his gooseberry, 
and muttering defiance to all the world. There is, 
too, another point of resemblance ; the fruit is liable 
to take the mildew when removed from British soil, 
just as John gets the blues, and wraps himself in a 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 173 

veil of his own foggy humors, whenever he goes 
abroad. My experience suggests that this capri- 
cious fruit be planted under the shadow of a north 
wall, in soil compact and deep ; it should be 
thoroughly enriched, pruned severely, watered abund- 
antly, and mulched (if possible) with kelp, fresh 
from the sea shore. These conditions and appli- 
ances may give a clean cheek, even to the Conquer- 
ing-Hero. 

But it is not so much for any piquancy of flavor 
that I prize the fruit, as because its English bloat is 
pleasantly suggestive of little tartlets (smothered in 
clotted cream) eaten long ago under the lee of Dart- 
moor hills — of Lancashire gardens, where prize 
berries reposed on little scaffoldings, or swam in 
porcelain saucers — and of bristling thickets in Cow- 
per's c Wilderness' by Olney. 

Is it lonely in my garden of a summer's evening ? 
Have the little pattering feet gone their ways — to 
bed ? Then I people the gooseberry alley with old 
Doctor Primrose, and his daughters Sophia and 
Olivia ; Squire Burchell comes, and sits upon the 
bench with me under the arbor, as I smoke my 
pipe. How shall we measure our indebtedness to 
such pleasant books, that people our solitude so 
many years after they are written ! Oliver Gold- 
smith, I thank you ! Crown-Bob, I thank you. 



174 MY FARM. 

Gooseberries, like the English, are rather indi- 
gestible. 

Of strawberries, I shall not speak as a committee- 
man, but as a simple lover of a luscious dish. I am 
not learned in kinds ; and have even had the niaiserie 
in the presence of cultivators, to confound Crimson 
Cone with Boston-Pine ; and have blushed to my 
eyelids, when called upon to name the British-Queen 
in a little collection of only four mammoth varieties. 
With strawberries, as with people, I believe in old 
friends. The early Scarlet, if a little piquant, is 
good for the first pickings ; and the Hovey, with a 
neighbor bed of Pines, or McAvoy, and Black 
Prince, if you please, give good flavor, and a well- 
rounded dish. The spicy Alpines should bring up 
the rear ; and as they send out but few runners, are 
admirably adapted for borders. The Wilson is a 
great bearer, and a fine berry ; but with the tweak 
of its acidity in my mouth, I can give its flavor no 
commendation. Supposing the land to be in good 
vegetable-bearing condition, and deeply dug, I know 
no dressing which will so delight the strawberry, as 
a heavy coat of dark forest-mould. They are the 
children of the wilderness, force them as we will ; 
and their little fibrous rootlets never forget their 
longing for the dark, unctuous odor of mouldering 
forest leaves. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 175 

Three great traveller's dishes of strawberries are 
in my mind. 

The first was at an inn in the quaint Dutch town 
of Broek : I can see now the heaped dish of mam- 
moth crimson berries, — the mug of luscious cream 
standing sentry, — the round red cheese upon its plat- 
ter, — the tidy hostess, with arms akimbo, looking 
proudly on it all : the leaves flutter idly at the lat- 
ticed window, through which I see wide stretches 
of level meadow, — broad-armed windmills flapping 
their sails leisurely, — cattle lying in lazy groups 
under the shade of scattered trees ; and there is no 
sound to break the June stillness, except the buzzing 
of the bees that are feeding upon the blossoms of the 
linden which overhangs the inn. 

I thought I had never eaten finer berries than the 
Dutch berries. 

The second dish was at the Douglas-Hotel in the 
city of Edinboro' ; a most respectable British tavern, 
with a heavy solid sideboard in its parlor ; heavy 
solid silver upon its table ; heavy and solid chairs 
with cushions of shining mohair ; a heavy and solid 
figure of a landlord ; and heavy and solid figures in 
the reckoning. 

The berries were magnificent ; served upon 
quaint old India-china, with stems upon them, and to 
be eaten as one might eat a fig, with successive bites, 



176 MY FARM. 

and successive dips in the sugar. The Scotch fruit 
was acid, I must admit, but the size was monument- 
al. I wonder if the stout landlord is living yet, and 
if the little pony that whisked me away to Salisbury 
crag, is still nibbling his vetches in the meadow by 
Holyrood ? 

The third dish was in Switzerland, in the month 
of October. I had crossed that day the Scheideck 
from Meyringen, had threaded the valley of Grindel- 
wald, and had just accomplished the first lift of the 
Wengern Alp — tired and thirsty — when a little peas- 
ant girl appeared with a tray of blue saucers, brim- 
ming with Alpine berries — so sweet, so musky, so 
remembered, that I never eat one now but the great 
valley of Grindelwald, with its sapphire show of 
glaciers, its guardian peaks, and its low meadows 
flashing green, is rolled out before me like a map. 

In those old days when we school-boys were 
admitted to the garden of the head-master twice in 
a season — only twice — to eat our fill of currants (his 
maid having gathered a stock for jellies two days 
before), I thought it 4 most-a-splendid ' fruit ; but I 
think far less of it now. My bushes are burdened 
with both white and red clusters, but the spurs are 
somewhat mossy, and the boughs have a straggling, 
dejected air. With a little care, severe pruning, 
due enrichment, and a proper regard to varieties 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 177 

(Cherry and White-Grape being the best), it may be 
brought to make a very pretty show as a dessert 
fruit. But as I never knew it to be eaten very 
freely at dessert, however finely it might look, I 
have not thought it worth while to push its propor- 
tions for a mere show upon the exhibition tables. 
The amateurs would smile at those I have ; but 1 
console myself with reflecting that they smile at a 
great deal of goodness which is not their own. 
They are full of conceit — I say it charitably. I like 
to upset their proprieties. 

There was one of them, an excellent fellow (if he 
had not been pomologically starched and jaundiced), 
who paid me a visit in my garden not long ago, 
bringing his little son, who had been educated 
strictly in the belief that all fine fruit was made — not 
to be enjoyed, but for pomological consideration. 
The dilettante papa was tip-toeing along with a look 
of serene and well-bred contempt for my mildewed 
gooseberries and scrawny currants, when I broke 
off a brave bough loaded with Tartarian cherries, 
and handed it to the lad, with — " Here, Harry, my 
boy, — we farmers grow these things to eat ! " 

What a grateful look of wonderment in his clear 
gray eyes ! 

The broken limb, the heresy of the action, the 
suddenness of it all, were too much for my fine friend. 
8* 



178 MY FARM. 

I do not think that for an hour he recovered from 
the shock to his sensibilities. 

Of raspberries, commend me to the Red-Ant- 
werp, and the Brinckle's Orange ; but to insure good 
fruitage, they should be protected from high winds, 
and should be lightly buried, or thoroughly ' strawed 
over ' in winter. The Perpetual, I have found a 
perpetual nuisance. 

The New-Rochelle or Lawton blackberry has 
been despiteful! y spoken of by many ; first, because 
the market-fruit is generally bad, being plucked 
before it is fully ripened ; and next, because in rich 
clayey grounds, the briers, unless severely cut back, 
and again back, grow into a tangled, unapproachable 
forest, with all the juices exhausted in wood. But 
upon a soil moderately rich, a little gravelly and 
warm, protected from wind, served with occasional 
top-dressings and good hoeings, the Lawton brier 
bears magnificent burdens. 

Even then, if you would enjoy the richness of the 
fruit, you must not be hasty to pluck it. When the 
children say with a shout, — " The blackberries are 
ripe ! " I know they are black only, and I can wait. 

When the children report — " The birds are eating 
the berries," I know I can still wait. But when they 
say — " The bees are on the berries," I know they are 
at full ripeness. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 179 

Then, with baskets we sally out ; I taking the 
middle rank, and the children the outer spray of 
boughs. Even now we gather those ODly which 
drop at the touch ; these, in a brimming saucer, with 
golden Alderney cream, and a soupqon of powdered 
sugar, are Olympian nectar ; they melt before the 
tongue can measure their full roundness, and seem to 
be mere bloated bubbles of forest honey. 

There is a scratch here and there, which calls 
from the children a half-scream ; but a big berry on 
the lip cures the smart ; and for myself, if the thorns 
draggle me, I rather fancy the rough caresses, and re- 
peat with the garden poet (humming it half aloud) : 

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; 
And oh ! so close your circles lace, 
That I may never leave this place ; 
But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
Ere I your silken bondage break, 
Do you, brambles, chain me too, 
And, courteous briers, nail me through. 

Grapes. 

IF the associations of the gooseberry are British, 
those of the vine are thoroughly Judaean. 
There is not a fruit that we grow, which has so ven- 
erable and so stately a history. Who does not 
remember the old Biblical picture in all the primers, 



180 MY FARM. 

of the stupendous cluster which the spies brought 
away from the brook Eshcol ? And I am afraid that 
many a youngster, comparing it with the milder 
growth which capped his dessert, has viewed it with 
a little of the Bishop-Colenso scepticism. 

Upon a certain day I give to my boy, — who has 
worked some mischief, — the smallest bunch of the 
dish. He poises it in his hand awhile, looking 
askance — doubtful if he will fling it down in a pet, or 
enjoy even so little. The latter feeling wins upon 
him, but is spiced with a bit of satire, that relieves 
itself in this way : 

" I think, papa (he is fresh from " Line upon 
Line "), that the spies wouldn't put a staff on their 
shoulders to carry such a bunch as that ! " 

By this admeasurement, indeed, no portion of New 
England can be counted equal to the land of Canaan. 
There are grapes, however, which yield gracefully to 
the requisitions of the climate, and furnish abundant 
clusters, if not large ones. As yet, for out-of-door 
culture — such as every farmer may plant with faith, 
and without trembling for the early frosts — the two 
most desirable are the Concord and Diana. The 
first the more hardy and sure ; the latter the more 
delicate and luscious. Indeed, few dessert fruits can 
outmatch a well-ripened, sun-freckled, fully developed 
and closely compacted bunch of the Diana grape. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 181 

The Catawba has its advocates, and it is really a 
dainty fruit if it have good range of sun, and is not 
hurried in its ripening ; but in delicacy of flavor it 
must yield to the Diana. The Catawba crop is also 
exceedingly uncertain in this latitude, by reason of 
the shortness of the season. A gaunt old vine of 
this variety, which stands behind the farmhouse, has 
given me only two crops in the six years past ; the 
frosts have garnered the promise of the others. I 
have now, however, contrived to conduct its trailing 
mantle upon a rude trellis, so as to completely 
embower the roof of the little outlying kitchen ; and 
the fumes and warmth of this latter, from its open 
skylights, have given to the old vine such a wonder- 
ful vigor and precocity, that I have promise of a full 
burden of well-ripened fruit in advance even of the 
Isabella. Can the reek of a kitchen be put to better 
service ? 

The Isabella escapes ordinary frosts, and is a pro- 
digious bearer ; but it has no rare piquancy of flavor ; 
and the same is to be said of its earlier congener, the 
Hartford-Prolific. 

Of all fruits, the grape is the one which, to insure 
perfection, will least tolerate neglect. I do not speak 
of those half-wild and flavorless crops, which hang 
their clusters up and down old elms, in neglected 
farm-yards, — but of that compact, close array of 



182 MY FARM. 

sunny bunches, where every berry is fully rounded, 
and every cluster symmetrical. It must have care in 
the planting, that its fibrous roots may take hold 
readily upon their new quarters ; care in position, 
which must, — first of all, be sheltered — next, have 
ample moisture — next, be utterly free from stagnant 
water, whether above ground or below — and finally, 
have fair and open exposure to the sun. It must 
have care in the training, that every spur and cluster 
may have its share of air and sunshine ; care in the 
winter pruning, to cut away all needless wood ; care 
in the summer pruning, to pinch down its affluence — 
to drive the juices into the fruit, and to restrain the 
vital forces from wasting themselves in a riotous life 
of leaves and tendrils. 

But the care required is not engrossing or fatigu- 
ing. Any country-liver may bestow it upon the 
score of vines which will abundantly supply his 
wants, without feeling the task. Nay, more ; this 
coy guidance of the luxuriant tendrils, — this delicate 
fettering of its abounding green life, — this opening 
of the clusters to the gladness of the sunshine, will 
make a man feel tenderly to the vine, and breed a 
fellowship that shall make all his restraints, and the 
plucking away of the waste shoots, seem to be mere 
offices of friendship. 

There is not, anywhere, a country house about 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 183 

which positions do not abound, where a vine may 
clamber, and feed upon resources that are worse 
than lost. The southern or eastern front of an old 
out-building ; a staring, naked wall (on which grapes 
ripen admirably) ; a great unseemly boulder, from 
under which the rootlets will pluck out the elements 
of the fairest fruit ; a back-court, where washings 
of sinks are wasting ; the palings of a poultry-yard — 
all these are positions, where, with small temptation, 
the mantling-vine will " creep luxuriant." 

I have not alluded to the Delaware, because, thus 
far, my plants have been poor ones, and my experi- 
ence unsuccessful. At best, however, the vine is of a 
more delicate temper than those named, and requires 
larger care and richer dressing. Under these con- 
ditions, I believe the grape to be all, which its friends 
claim — of a delicate and highly aromatic flavor, — so 
early as to be secure against frosts, and giving a bet- 
ter promise than any other, of a really good domes- 
tic wine. 

I am surprised to find in the course of my drives 
back in the country, how many of our old-time far- 
mers are applying themselves, in a modest and some- 
what furtive way, to wine-making. It is true that 
they bring under contribution a great many foxy 
swamp varieties, and are not over-careful in regard 
to ripeness ; but faults of acidity they correct by a 



184 MY FARM. 

heavy sugaring, which gives an innocent and boun- 
cing percentage of alcohol. 

The practice is not, I fear, entered upon with a 
purely horticultural love, and I suspect they bring a 
more lively stomachic fondness to it, than do the 
pomologists to their science of fruiting. I think the 
development of this home manufacture has been 
quickened by Maine-laws, heavy import duties, and 
by a growing reluctance on the part of the heads of 
families — to carry a demijohn in the wagon. I also 
hear the home product commended by the old gen- 
tlemen manufacturers, as " warming to the in'ards ; " 
and in large doses, I should think it might be. Their 
town customers for this beverage are mostly exceed- 
ingly serious and sedate people, who have a comical 
way of calling homemade wines — " pure juice." 

And pray, why should not sedate people enjoy the 
good things of life, — call them by what names they 
will ? I know an exceedingly worthy man who never 
buys his cider except of a deacon ; and then only by 
the cask ; and he buys it very often. 

Plums, Apricots, and Peaches. 

I AM sorry to give so poor an account, as I needs 
must, of these stone-fruits. As respects the 
plum, there is, indeed, an incompatibility of soil upon 
my farm, to be contended against ; but this difficulty 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 185 

is trifling, in comparison with the mischiefs of the 
arch-enemy, the curculio. The few trees which I 
found suffering under black-knot in its most aggra- 
vated form, I am sorry to say, died under surgical 
treatment. Others have been planted to supply their 
places ; — planted in the poultry yard — planted in 
positions where the earth would be hard trampled, — 
planted in shelter and out of shelter ; but although 
showing fair vigor, and a pretty array of blossoms, 
no device thus far adopted has succeeded in arresting 
the spoliations of the curculio. Paving the ground is 
vain ; the forage of poultry is vain ; underlying 
water is vain ; and there remain only three re- 
sources — to jar off the vermin, gather them and kill 
them ; or second, to deluge the young fruit with a 
wash that shall nauseate the enemy; or third, to 
shield the trees or fruit with a gauze covering, that 
shall forbid attack. They are good devices against 
any enemy ; but extermination is a slow process ; if 
you nauseate the enemy, you are nauseated in turn ; 
and the gauze protection involves a greater sacrifice 
than the sacrifice of the fruit. 

These reasons, though coimting against the plum 
as a market product, do not, of course, forbid its 
growth as a luxury, — which, like many other luxuries, 
must be paid for in fourfold its value. 

I would by no means undervalue the plum ; least 



186 MY FARM. 

of all, that prince or princess of plums, Heine- Claude 
(Green-Gage), of which, in the sunny towns along 
the Loire, I have purchased a golden surfeit for a 
few sous : when I remember those, and their luscious 
and cheap perfection, crowning the peasants' gardens, 
I am a little disheartened at thought of the tobacco 
washes, and whale-oil soap and syringes, with which 
we must enter into combat with the curculio, for 
only a most flimsy supply. 

The nectarine is subject to the same blight ; and 
the apricot furnishes only a very dismal residuum of 
a crop. As an espalier, it is not, I think, so subject 
to the ravages of the curculio as in its unfettered 
condition ; but upon the wall (particularly if one of 
southern exposure), it is exceedingly liable to injury 
from the late frosts of Spring. I succeed in saving 
a few from all enemies every year ; but they are so 
wan — so pinched, as hardly to serve for souvenir of 
the golden Moor-parks which crown an August din- 
ner at Vefours or the Trois-Freres. It is an old fruit ; 
the Persians had it ; the Egyptians have gloried in 
it these centuries past ; Columella names it in his gar- 
den poem ; and Palladius advises that it be grafted 
upon the almond : * will the nurserymen make trial ? 

* It occurs in Tit. vii., Novera., where he discourses of the 
peach. " Inseritur in se, in amygdalo, in pruno : sed Armenia, vel 
PRiECOQUA prunis, duracina amygdalis melius adhcerescunt" etc. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 187 

It will be remembered that in an early chapter I 
made mention of certain dilapidated peach trees upon 
the premises, which were even then showing unfailing 
signs of the ' yellows.' This vegetable dyspepsia has 
long since carried them off. Indeed, there are but 
few belts of land throughout New England where a 
man may hope successful culture of this fruit. The 
borer is an ugly enemy to begin with ; but with close 
watchfulness, the attacks of this insect may be pre- 
vented. His cousin, the curculio, does not greatly 
affect the downy cheek of a young peach. Yet still, 
in the absence of more tempting surfaces, he will 
leave upon it his Turkish signet. Next, comes a 
curious, foul twisting of the leaves, due — may be — to 
some minute family of aphides ; but this can be miti- 
gated by judicious pruning ; after these escapes, and 
when your mouth is watering in view of a luscious 
harvest, there appear symptoms of a new disease ; 
the leaves cease to expand ; the fruit takes on a pre- 
mature bloom, and a multitude of little shoots start 
here and there from the bark, being weakly attempts 
to struggle against the consuming 'yellows.' And 
if all these difficulties be fairly escaped or overcome, 
there remains the damaging fact, that in three win- 
ters out of five, in most New England exposures, the 
extreme cold will utterly destroy the germ of the 
fruit buds. 



183 MY FARM. 

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, however, I 
continue to put out from year to year, a few young 
trees; not making regular plantations, but dotting 
them about, in shrubberies, and in unoccupied gar- 
den corners, grouping them in the lee of old walls 
— in the poultry yard, — upon the north side of 
buildings, — in every variety of position and of soil. 
In this way I contrive — except the January tempera- 
ture shows ten below zero — to secure a fair table 
supply. Even amid the shrubbery of the lawn, where 
I counted their bloom and foliage a sufficient return, 
there have been gathered scores of delicious peaches. 

I know that it is disorderly, and shocking to all 
the prejudices of the learned, to plant fruit trees in 
this hap-hazard way. But I love these offences 
against system (particularly when system is barren 
of triumphs). I love to test Nature's own ruling, 
and give her margin for wide demonstration. 



The Poultry. 

I KNOW not whether to begin my discourse of 
poultry with a terrific onslaught upon all feath- 
ered creation, or to speak the praises of the matronly 
fowls, which supply delicate spring chickens to the 
table, and profusion of eggs. "When, on some ill- 
fated day, a pestilent, pains-taking hen, with her 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 189 

brood of eager chicklings, has found her way into 
my hot-bed, and has utterly despoiled the most 
cherished plants ; or a marauding drove of young 
turkeys has cropped all the late cauliflowers, I am 
madly bent upon extermination of the whole tribe. 

But reflection comes — with a nice fresh egg to my 
breakfast, or a delicate grilled fowl to my dinner — and 
the feathered people take a new lease of life. They 
give a sociable, habitable air, moreover, to a country 
dwelling. The contented, good-humored cluck of the 
hens, breeds contentment in the on-looker. They are 
rare philosophers, taking the world as they find it ; — 
now a blade of grass, now a lurking worm ; here a 
stray kernel of grain, and there some tid-bit of a 
butter-fly ; taking their siesta with a wing and a leg 
stretched out in the sun, and like the rest of us, 
warning away from their own feeding ground, birds 
less strong than themselves, with an authoritative dab 
of their bills. Although amenable to laws of habit, 
— traversing regular beats for their supply of wild 
food, and collecting at regular hours for such as the 
mistress may have to bestow, they are yet rebellious 
against undue or extraordinary show of authority. 
It is quite impossible to exercise any safe control 
over the locality where the hens* choose to execute 
their maternal duties. They insist upon freedom of 
the will in the matter, as obstreperously, and, I dare 



190 MY FARM. 

say, as logically, as ever any old-school dialectician 
in his metaphysical homilies. 

Nothing could be more charming than the ar- 
rangement, matured with the co-operation of an 
ingenious country carpenter, by which my fowls 
were to lay in one set of boxes, carefully darkened, 
and to carry on their incubation in another set of 
boxes, made cheery (against the long confinement), 
with sky-light ; there were admirable little architec- 
tural galleries through which they were to prome- 
nade in the intervals of these maternal duties — adroit 
disposition of courts, and feeding troughs, so that 
there should be no ill-advised collision, — but it was 
all in vain. Hens persisted in laying where they 
should not lay, and in setting, with badly-directed 
instinct, upon the dreariest of porcelain eggs. The 
fowls of my Somersetshire neighbor, meantime, at 
the stone cottage, with nothing more orderly in the 
way of nests, than a stray lodgment in the haymow, 
or a castaway basket looped under the rafters of a 
shed, brought out brood after brood, so full, and 
fresh, and lusty, as to put my architectural devices to 
shame. 

At certain times, when the condition of the gul- 
den or crops allow it, I permit my fowls free forage ; 
and as they stroll off over the lawn and among the 
shrubberies, it sometimes happens that they come in 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 191 

contact with the more vagabond birds of the larger 
farm family. The hens take the meeting philosophi- 
cally, with a well-bred lack of surprise, and are not 
deterred for a moment from their forage employ ; 
perhaps, (if with a brood) giving an admonitory 
cluck to their chicks, to keep near them, — even as old 
ladies with daughters, in a strange place, advise 
caution, without enjoining positive non-intercourse. 

The ducks, on the contrary, in a very low-bred 
manner, give way to a world of surprises, and gad 
about each other, dipping their heads, and quacking, 
and bickering, like old gossips long time apart, who 
pour interminable scandal in each other's ears. The 
cocks make an honest, fair fight of it, and one goes 
home draggled, confining himself thereafter to his 
own quarters. 

The Turkeys meet as fine ladies do, tip-toeing 
round and round, and eyeing each other with earnest 
scrutiny, and abundant curvetings of the neck — very 
stately, dignified, and impudent — stooping to browse 
perhaps (ladies sniff" thus at vinaigrettes), as if no 
strange fowl were near, — which is merest affectation. 
They summon their little families into close order, 
as if fearing contagion, and eyeing each other, 
wander apart, without a sign of companionship, or 
a gobble of leave-taking. 

I must not forget the groups of Guinea-fowl, who 



192 MY FARM. 

fraternize charmingly, and threaten to become one 
family. These birds, unlike all other feathered 
animals, show no marked difference of appearance 
between the sexes ; so slight is this indeed, that 
even the naturalists have blundered into errors, and 
left us in the dark.* Even a fighting propensity 
does not distinguish the cock, I observe ; for the 
female bird is an arrant termagant, and has under- 
taken, in my own flock, a fierce battle with a tom- 
turkey, in which, though worsted, and eventually 
killed, she showed a fine chivalrous pluck. They 
are not, however, quarrelsome among themselves ; 
although flocking together in communities, the male 
birds are strictly faithful to their mates, and mani- 
fest none of the sultanic propensities which so de- 
2jlorably mislead the other domestic fowls. 

Notwithstanding their harsh cry, to which the 
Greeks gave a special descriptive name, f I like the 
Guinea-fowl ; they are excellent layers, enormous 
devourers of insects — a little over-fond, it is true, 
of young cauliflowers, and grapes, — yet a stanch, 
lively, self-possessed bird ; and notwithstanding the 
sneers of Varro,J whose taste must have been poor 
in the matter of poultry, — excellent eating. 

* Buffon ; Be la Pintard. f Kayicd£eiv. 

\ Lib. III., De Re Rust. Hae novissimse in triclinium ganearium 
introierunt h culina propter fastidium hominum. Veneunt propter 
penuriaru magno. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 193 

The young Guineas, like the young turkeys, are 
delicate however, and suffer from sudden changes of 
temperature. Give them what care you will, and all 
the dietetic luxuries of the books, and on some fine 
morning, you shall find the half of a brood moping 
and staggering, and drooping out of life. The 
young turkeys are even more subject to infantile 
ailments, and their invalid caprices outmatch all the 
nostrums of the doctors. Yet some old spectacled 
lady in the back country, with nothing better than a 
turned-up barrel in the way of shelter, will by an 
easy and indescribable 'knack' of treatment, rear 
such broods as cannot be rivalled by any literal 
execution of the rules of Boswell and Doyle. 

Beyond the age of six weeks, however, danger 
mostly ceases, and the poults have a good chance- 
barring the foxes— of coining to the honors of de- 
capitation ; and I know few prettier farm sights, 
than a squadron of pure white turkeys, marching 
over new mown grass-land, with their skirmishers 
deployed on either flank, and rioting among the 
grasshoppers. It is essential that both Guinea-fowl 
and Turkeys have free and wide range ; they are 
natural wanderers ; my hens submit to a curtailment 
of their liberties with more cheerfulness ; but there 
is after all, no biped of which I have knowledge, 
that does not glory in freedom. The Black Spanish 



19 i MY FARM. 

fowls, Dorkings, and Polish top-knots, (for these 
make up my variety, and are, I believe, the best), 
form no exception ; and if confinement is necessary, 
the enclosing palingis should be of generous width. 
A safe rule is — to make the enclosure so large 
(whatever the number of the flock), that the fowls 
will not wholly subdue the grass, or forbid its health- 
ful vegetation. If too small for this, it is impera- 
tively necessary for thrift, that they have a run of 
an hour each day before sunset. 

The oldest English writer upon the subject of 
poultry was a certain Leonard Mascall, who wrote 
about the year 1581 — when Queen Mary was fretting 
in her long confinement, and Sir Francis Drake was 
voyaging around the world. He had been farmer to 
King James, and calls his little black-letter book, 
" The husbandrye, cvdring, and governmente of 
poultrie." Among his headings are " How to keepe 
egges long." — " How to have egges all winter," — 
" Of nennes that hatches abroad, as in bushes," — 
" Of turquie hennes, profite and also disprofite." 

For winter eggs, he advises " to take the croppes 
of nettles when ready to seed, dry them, and mix 
them with bran and hemp-seed, and give it to the 
hens in the morning, and also to give them the 
seedes of cow-make," (whatever that may be.) I 
have never ventured trial of his advices ; but find 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 195 

full supply in giving hens warm quarters — a closed 
house, with double walls, and its front entirely of 
glass ; here, with water constantly ' running, an 
ample ash box and gravel bed, full feeding, — not 
forgetting scraps of meat, and occasional vegetable 
diet — the hens make a summer of the winter, and 
reward all care. If the weather be very warm, they 
are allowed a little rim in the adjoining barn-yard 
(their winter home being, in fact, a rustic transmuta- 
tion of an ancient cow-shed). Any considerable 
chilliness of the atmosphere, however, — if they are 
long exposed to it, — checks their laying propensities, 
and two or three days of housing are needed to 
restore the due equilibrium. 

The Roman writers give us cruel hints in regard 
to the fattening of fowls, which I have never had the 
heart to try. They go beyond the rules of the 
Strasburg poulterers in harshness ; and that elegant 
heathen Columella, has the effrontery to advise that 
the legs of young doves be broken, in order to cram 
them the more quickly. Such suggestions belonged, 
of right, to a period when Roman ladies — Sabina, 
and Delia, and Octavia — looked down coolly on 
gladiators, gashing their lives out with bare sabres, 
and then lolled home in chariots, to dine on thrushes, 
fatted in the dark. We, — good Christians that we 
are, — shudder at thought of such barbarism; we pit 



196 MY FARM. 

no bare-backed gladiators against each other, with 
drawn swords, in our very presence ; but we send 
armies out, of a hundred thousand in blue and gray, 
and look at their butchery of each other, very coolly, 
— through the newspapers, — and dine on pate de fois 
gras. Of course we have improved somewhat in al] 
these ages, since Columella broke pigeons' legs ; of 
course we are civilized ; but the Devil is very strong 
in us still. 

Is it Profitable f 

WHEN I have shown some curious city visitor 
all these belongings of the farm — have 
enlisted his admiration for my crested, golden, Polish 
fowls, — for my garden, for the fruits ; — for the wide 
stretch of fields, and the herd of cows loitering under 
the shadow of the scattered apple trees, he turns 
upon me, in his city way, with the abrupt question- 
ing, " Isn't it confoundedly expensive, though, get- 
ting land smoothed out in this style — what with your 
manures, and levelling, and planting trees ? " 

And I answer — " "N — n — no ; no ; (somewhat 
bolder.) There's a certain amount of labor involved, 
to be sure, and labor has to be paid for, you know. 
But there are the vegetables, the chickens, the eggs, 
the milk, and the fruit, which must come out of the 
shops, unless a man have a home supply." 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 197 

4 ; To be sure, you're quite right ; " and I think he 
admitted the observation, as many city people incline 
to, as a new idea. " But," he added, with an awkward 
inquisitiveness, " Do you ever get any money back ? " 
My friend was not a reader of the Agricultural 
Journals, or he could not have failed to notice the 
pertinacity with which the profitableness of farming 
is urged and re-urged. Indeed, with all considera- 
tion for the calling, I think it is somewhat too per- 
sistently pressed. It suggests — rather too strongly 
the urgence of the recruiting sergeant, in setting 
forth the profitableness of soldiering. I do not 
observe that army contractors magnify the gains of 
their craft very noisily. The hens that lay golden 
eggs never cackle j at least, I never heard them. 

The question of my friend remains however, 

" Do you ever get any money back, — eh ? " 
What an odious particularity many of these city 
people have ! What a crucial test they bring to the 
delightful suroundings of a country home ! Have 
they no admiration for such stretch of fields, such 
herds, and the shrubberies, on whose skirts the flowers 
are gleaming ? Somebody has suggested that the 
forbidden fruit with which the Devil tempted Eve, 
and which Eve plucked to the sorrow of her race, 
was — money. A tree whose fruit carries knowledge 
of good and evil, is surely not an inapt figure of 



198 MY FARM. 

the capabilities cf money — by which all men and 
women stand tempted to-day. The Paradise tree is 
not popularly supposed to grow largely on the farms 
of amateurs. 

But the question returns — " Do you get any 
money back ? " 

I think it must be fairly admitted that with most 
amateur farmers, the business (if we reckon it 
business) is only an elegant luxury ; absorbing in a 
quite illimitable manner, all loose funds at the dis- 
posal of the adventurer, and returning — smooth fields, 
sleek cattle, delicious fruits, and possibly, a few 
annual premiums. We never get at their ' memo- 
randa.' Mr. Mechi, indeed, of the Tip-tree Hall, 
gave us an exhibit of his expenses and his sales ; 
but he found it necessary to support the statement 
with sundry affidavits ; people showed wanton dis- 
trust ; and I think there is an earnest belief among 
shrewd observers, that the razor straps, soaps, and 
dressing-cases of Leaden-Hall street (where his 
original business lies), are, in a large degree, credi- 
tors of the Tip-tree Hall farming. 

But Mr. Mechi is something more than an ama- 
teur ; he is an innovator ; and has sustained his in- 
novations with a rare business capacity, and that 
inexorable system, which can make even weak ideas 
exhibit a compacted strength. Amateurs then, can- 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 199 

not take shelter under cover of Mr. Mechi's figures. 
Farming remains an elegant amusement only, for 
those who can afford to buy all that they need, and 
to sell nothing that they raise ; and a profitable 
employment, only (in the majority of instances), for 
those who can afford to sell all that they raise, and 
buy nothing that they need. 

" Does any money come back, eh ? " 

The question of my persistent friend must be 
met. And I do not know how it can be more fairly 
met, than by giving an abstract of accounts for the 
first year, third year, and fifth year of occupancy. 

Debit and Credit. 

LET us count first all extraordinary repairs and 
necessary implements on taking possession, as 
part of the farm investment ; next, let us set off the 
interest upon investment, against house rent, and all 
home consumption. Thus, — if a farm cost $12,000, 
(and I use illustrative figures only), and if the needed 
repairs and implements at the start involve an outlay 
of $3,000 more — we have a total of $15,000, upon 
which the interest ($900), may be fairly set off against 
rent, and the poultry, dairy products, fuel, vegetables, 
etc., consumed upon the place. A shrewd working 
farmer would say that this implied altogether too 



200 MY FARM. 

large a home consumption, for reasonable profit ; but 
to those who come from the city to the country, 
with the detemiination to enjoy its bounties to the 
full, it will appear very moderate. In any event, it 
Avill simplify the comparison I wish to make between 
the actual working expenses of a farm, and the 
results of positive sales. But let us come to figures : 

FIRST TEAR—EDGEWOOD FARM. 

Dr. 

To Valuation of live stock,. . . .$1,20000 

" Interest on do., .... 72 00 

" Purchase of new stock, . . . 300 00 

" Labor, 1,200 00 

" Hay and grain bought, . . . 150 00 

" Seeds, trees, etc., .... 150 00 

" Manures, 250 00 

44 "Wear and tear of implements, . 100 00 

44 Taxes, insurance, and incidentals, . 100 00 





$3,522 00 


Cr. 




By Valuation stock, close of yr., . 


. $1,400 00 


" Sales do., .... 


250 00 


." do. milk, .... 


600 00 


44 do. butter, 


50 00 


" do. vegetables, 


60 00 


" do. fruits, .... 


10 00 


44 do. eggs and poultry, . 


25 00 


44 do. sundries, 


75 00 




$2,470 00 


44 Balance (loss), .... 


. 1,052 00 



$3,522 00 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 201 

First years of any adventure do not offer a very 
appetizing show — least of all the adventure of restor- 
ing a neglected farm. 

If this record does not prove entertaining to the 
reader, I can frankly say that he has my heartiest 
sympathies. The great enormity lies in the labor 
account — always the enormity in any reckoning of 
American farming, as compared with British or Con- 
tinental. It must be remembered, however, that a 
large proportion of the sum named, went to the 
execution of permanent improvements, and that two- 
thirds of it would have been amply sufficient for the 
exigencies of the farm- work proper 

Let us slip on now to the 



THIRD YEAR. 




Dr. 




To Valuation of stock, . 


. $1,500 00 


" Interest on do., .... 


90 00 


" Purchase of new stock 


200 00 


" Labor bills, 


1,100 00 




150 00 


" Hay and grain bought, . , 


120 00 


" Seeds, trees, etc., 


50 00 


" Wear and tear of implements, 


100 00 


" Taxes, insurance, and incidentals, . 


. 100 00 




$3,410 00 


u Balance (gain), . . . 


615 00 



$4,025 00 



202 



MY FARM. 




Cb. 




By Valuation stock, close of yr., . 


. $1,600 00 






" do. milk, . . 


. 1,650 00 


" do. vegetables, . 


250 00 


" do. fruits, . 


125 00 


" do. poultry, 


100 00 


" do. sundries, .... 


100 00 



$4,025 00 

This has a more cheerful look, but is not gor 
geous ; yet the fields are wearing a trim look, and 
there is a large percentage of increased productive 
capacity, which if not put down in figures, has yet a 
very seductive air for the eye of an imaginative pro- 
prietor. Two years later the account stands thus : — 



FIFTH TEAR. 




De. 




To Valuation of stock, . 


. $1,700 00 


" Interest on do., 


102 00 


" Purchase of new stock, 


180 00 


" Labor bills, . 


1,000 00 


" Manures, 


100 00 


" Grain purchased, .... 


130 00 


" Seeds, trees, &c, 


60 00 


" Wear and tear of implements, 


100 00 


" Insurance, taxes, and incidentals, 


120 00 




$3,492 00 


u Balance (gain), .... 


988 00 



$4,480 00 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 203 

Or. 

By Valuation stock, close of yr„. . . $1,700 00 

" Sales do 230 00 

" do. milk, 1,900 00 

" do. vegetables, .... 250 00 

" do. fruit, 150 00 

" do. poultry, . . . . 130 00 

" do. sundries, .... 120 00 



$4,480 00 



These figures though written roundly, are (frac- 
tions apart) essentially true ; I would match them for 
honesty (though not for largeness), against any 
official report I have latterly seen — not excepting the 
" Quicksilver mining," or the Quartermaster General's. 

If we analyze these accounts, we shall find the 

Average interest upon investment, (say) $1,000 00 
Average working expenses, . . 1,800 00 



Total, ..... 


$2,800 00 


On the other side the 




Average ca3h sales are, 

House rent and home consumption, 


. $2,600 00 
900 00 



Total, $3,500 00 

Leaving profit of $700, which is equivalent to ten 
per cent, upon the supposed capital;— all this, under 
the cheerful hypothesis that personal supervision is a 
mere amusement, and is not justly chargeable to the 



204 MY FARM. 

farm. If otherwise, and the overlook be rated as 
Government or corporate officials rate such service, 
the credit balance becomes ignominiously small. 

It is to be considered, however, that the growing 
productive capacity of the soil, under generous man- 
agement, may be estimated at no small percentage ; 
and the inevitable increase in value of all lands in 
the close neighborhood of growing towns, may be 
counted in the light of another percentage. 

All this is not certainly very Ophir-like, nor yet 
very dreary. 

Again, it is to be remarked that the entries for 
labor, and incidental expenses in the accounts given, 
are for those expenses only, which contributed directly 
either to the farm culture, or conditions of culture — 
not all essential, perhaps, but all coutributory. If, 
however, the Bucolic citizen have a taste to gratify — 
in architectural dovecots, in hewn walls, in removal 
of ledges, in graperies, in the planting of long 
ranges of Osage-Orange (which the winter mice 
consume), the poor little credit balance of the farm 
account, is quite lost in the blaze of agricultural 
splendor. 

I do not at all deny the charm of such luxuries. 
I only say — that they are luxuries ; and in the 
present state of the butter and egg markets, must 
be paid for as such. And the life that is lived amid 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 205 

such luxuries is not so much a farm life, as it is a life 
— a long way from town. 

Rus hoc vocari debet, an domus longe ? 

It is the irony of Martial in the concluding line 
of his Faustine epigram ; and with it, I whip my 
chapter of figures to a close. 

Money-Making Farmers. 

WHERE are the men then, who have grubbed 
out of the reluctant eastern soil, their 
stocking-legs of specie, and their funds at the bank ? 
They are not wholly myths ; there are such. Find 
me a man, who, by aptitude at bargaining (let us not 
call it jockeyism), can reduce the labor estimates in 
the foregoing accounts by a third ; and who, by a 
kindred quality, can add to the amount of sales by a 
third ; who can, by dint of early rising and per- 
petual presence, stretch the ten-hour system into 
twelve or fourteen ; who, by a conquest of all finer 
appetites, can reduce the home consumption to a 
third of the figure named in my estimates, and you 
have a type of one class. A union of tremendous 
energy and shrewdness ; keenly alive to the phases 
of the market ; an ally of all the hucksters ; sharp to 
pounce upon some poor devil of an emigrant, before 
he has learned the current rate of wages ; gifted with 



206 MY FARM. 

a quick scent for all offal, which may be had for the 
cartage, and which goes to pig food, or the fermen- 
tation of compost. 

I think I have hinted at a character which those 
will recognize, who know the neighborhood of large 
New England towns : a prompt talker — not bashful, 
— full of life — selectman, perhaps ; great in corner 
groceries, ; forehanded,' indefatigable, trenchant, 
with an eye always to windward. 

If I were to sketch another type of a New Eng- 
land farmer, who is, in a small way, successful, — it 
would be a sharp-nosed man, thin, wiry, with a blue- 
ness about the complexion, that has come from 
unlimited buffe tings of northwesters ; one who has 
been c moderator ' at town meetings, in his day, and 
upon school committees over and over ; one who has 
sharpened his tongue by occasional talk at * society ' 
meeting — to say nothing of domestic practice. 

I think of him as living in a two-story, white 
house, with green blinds, (abutting closely upon the 
road,) and whose front rooms he knows only by half- 
yearly summations to a minister's tea-drinking, or 
the severer ordeal of the sewing circle. His hands 
are stiff and bony ; all the callosities of axe and 
scythe and hoe, have blended into one horny texture, 
the whole of the epidermis ; yet his eye has a keen 
shrewd flash in it, from the depths cf sixty years ; 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 207 

and under the hair of his temple, you may see a 
remaining bit of bleached skin, which shows that he 
was — fifty odd years ago — a fair complexioned boy. 

He has grown gray upon his straggling farm of 
one or two hundred acres ; yet it is doubtful if the 
farm will produce more now, than on the day he 
entered into possession. Some walls have been 
renewed, and the old ones are tottering. Broken 
bar-ways have been replaced by new ones ; the wood 
pile has its stock year after year ; and every tenth 
year, when oil is down, the house has its coat of 
paint — himself being mixer and painter — save under 
the eaves, for which ladder work, he employs a 
country journeyman, who takes half pay in pork or 
grain. When i help ' is low, he clears some out- 
standing rye field, and commences a new bit of wall 
— a disunited link, which possibly his heirs may 
complete. Every year, six, ten, or twelve hogs grow 
into plethoric proportions ; every year they are 
butchered, under a great excitement of hot water, 
lard-tryings, unctuous fatty smells — sausage stuffing, 
and sales to the ' packer ' of the town. Every year 
he tells their weight to his neighbors, between ser- 
vices, at meeting — with his thumb and forefinger in 
the pocket of his black waistcoat, and the same sly 
twinkle in his eye. 

Every spring he has his * veals ' — four, six, ten, 



208 MY FARM. 

— as the case may be ; and every spring he higgles 
in much the same way with the town butcher, in 
regard to age, to price, and to fatness. Every sum- 
mer I see him in black hat and black dress coat, on 
his wagon box, with butter firkins behind (the covers 
closed on linen towels by the mistress at home), 
driving to the market. And if I trot behind him on 
his return, I see that his exchange has procured him 
a two-gallon jug of molasses, a savory bundle of 
dried codfish, a moisty paper parcel of brown sugar, 
a tight little bag of timothy seed, and a new hoe, or 
dung fork. But he never allows his spendings to 
take up the gross sum of his receipts ; always there 
goes home a modicum, which grows by slow and 
gradual accretions into notes (secured by mortgage), 
of some unthrifty neighbor, or an entry upon the 
columns of his book at the Savings. 

There is no amateur of ■ them all, who receives as 
much into a third, for what he may have to sell ; nor 
any one who spends as little, by two-thirds, for what 
he may have to buy. It is incredible what such a 
man will save in the way of barter ; and equally 
incredible how rarely he finds occasion to pay out 
money at all. Yet he is observant of proprieties ; 
his pew-rent at the meeting house, and tax bills are 
punctually honored. If I bargain with him, he loves 
deliberation ; he has an opinion, but it only appears 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 209 

after long travail, and comparison of views — in the 
course of which, he has whittled a stout billet of 
wood to a very line point. If I address him in the 
field, he stops — leans on his hoe — and is willing to 
lavish upon me the only valuable commodity fur 
which he makes no charge, to wit — his time. 

Such a farmer repairs his barn promptly, when 
the sills are giving way ; he does not hesitate at the 
purchase of a ' likely pair of cattle ' at a bargain ; 
he will buy occasional bags of guano, upon proof in 
his turnip patch, or on his whiter rye ; but if a sub- 
soil plow is recommended, he gives a sly twinkle to 
that gray eye of his, and a complimentary allusion to 
the old ' Eagle No. 4,' which settles the business. 

Such men are in their way — money-makers ; but 
rather by dint of not spending, than by large jDrofits. 
These back-country gentlemen have their families — 
educated (thanks to our school system) ; — boys, lank 
at the first, in short-armed coats, and with a pinch 
of the vowel sounds in their speech ; but they do not 
linger around such a homestead ; they come to the 
keeping of hotels, or of woodyards on the Missis- 
sippi ; many are written down in the dead-books of 
the war. 

Our money-saving farmer has his daughter too, 
with her Chrysanthemums and striped-grass at the 
door, and her pink monster of a Hydrangea. She has 



210 MY FARM. 

her Lady's book, and her Ledger, and on such liter- 
ary food grows apace ; but such reading does not 
instil a healthy admiration for the dairy or butter- 
making ; rosy cheeks and incarmined arms do not 
belong to the heroines of her dreams. I do not think 
she ever heard of Kit Marlowe's song : — 
" Come live with me, and be my love." 

The faint echoes of the town in fashion plates and 
sensation stories, make a weird, intoxicating music, in 
listening to which, in weary bewilderment, she has 
no ear for a brisk bird-song. No wild flowers from 
the wood, are domesticated at her door. I catch no 
sight of sun bonnets, or of garden trowels. Out of 
door life is shunned ; and hence, come sallowness, 
unhealthiness, narrowness — not even the well-devel- 
oped physique of the town girl, who has the pave- 
ments for her marches and countermarches. I hear, 
indeed, in summer weather, the tinkle of a piano ; but 
it frights away the wrens ; and of the two, I must 
say that I prefer the wrens. 

All this unfits for thorough sympathy with the 
every day life of the father ; and when common 
sympathies do not unite a family, its career breaks at 
the death of the patron. If there be nothing in the 
country life which can call out and sustain the pride 
of all members of the country family, it can never 
offer tempting career to the young. 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 211 

From these causes it is, that Dorothy will very 
likely be a weazen-faced old maid, hopeful of any- 
thing but the tender longing of Overbury's " Faire 
Milke-Maide." Too instructed to admire the sharp 
roughnesses of her wiry papa ; too liberalized, it 
may be, by her reading, to bear mildly his peevish 
closeness ; not kindling into a love of the beauties of 
nature, because none will sympathize with that love 
— dreaming over books that carry her to a land of 
mirage, and make her still more unfit for the every 
day duties of life ; — not recognizing the heroism of 
successful struggle with mediocrity and homely du- 
ties ; — yearning for what is not to be hers, she is 
the ready victim of illnesses against which she has 
neither the vigor nor the wish to struggle. 

" So, Dorothy is gone ! Squire," says the country 
parson ; " Let us pray to God for his blessing." 

The darkened parlors are opened now ; the far- 
mer's daughter is a bride, and death is the groom. 

The gilt-backed books are dusted ; the cobwebs 
swept away ; the black dress-suit rebrushed ; the 
twinkle of the eye is temporarily banished ; the 
neighbors are gathered ; the warning spoken ; the 
procession moves ; and the grave closes it all. 

The Artemisias bloom on, and the purple tufts of 
Hydrangea ; — poor Dorothy's flowers ! 

It is a little picture from the life of certain money- 



£12 MY FARM. 

making farmers, who pinch — to save. There is a 
jingling resonance of money at the end, but it is 
not tempting ; it has come upon a barren life, with- 
out glow or reach — a life whose parlors have been 
always closed. 

Does Farming Pay? 

AND now let us preciser the whole matter, and 
get rid, if we can, of that interminable ques- 
tion — does Farming pay ? 

Will shop-keeping pay ? Will tailoring or Doc- 
toring pay ? Will life pay ? How do these ques- 
tions sound ? And yet they are as reasonable as the 
one we come to consider. Tell me of the capacity 
of the Doctor — of the tailor ; tell me of his location, 
and of his aptitude for the business, and I can 
answer. Tell me of what material you propose to 
make a farmer, tell me of his habits, and of the con- 
dition of his soil and markets, and I can tell you if 
he will find a profit or none ; and this, without re- 
gard to Liebig, Short-horns, or the mineral theory. 

Successful farming, it must be understood, is not 
that which secures a large monied result this year, 
and the next year, and the year after ; but it is that 
which ensures to the land a constantly accumulating 
fertility, in connection with remunerative results. 
The theory of the agricultural doctors, that every 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 213 

year, as much of the nutritive elements of land should 
be restored, as the annual cropping removes, may be 
good ruling for virgin soil, or for the Lothians, or 
Belgian gardens ; but for neglected or poor soil, a 
larger restoration is needed ; — if not by manures, then 
by tillage or drainage. Exact equipoise is difficult, 
and implies no advance. It is neither easy nor 
desirable to be forever balancing oneself upon a 
tight rope. If progressive farming will not pay, it 
is quite certain that no other farming will. 

I know there are many quiet old gentlemen 
among the hills, who have a sleepy way of putting 
in their corn patch year after year, and a sleepy way 
of clearing out their meagre pittance of drenched 
manure, and a sleepy way of never spending, who 
drop off some day, leaving money in their purse ; but 
such success does not tempt the young ; it gives no 
promise of a career. " Pork and cabbage for dinner, 
and the land left lean," — might be written on their 
gravestones. 

The faculty of not-spending, is cultivated by 
many farmers, a great deal more faithfully than 
their lands ; but the faculty of right-spending (foe- 
ultas impendendi) ,* is at the bottom of all signal 

* The language of Columella, which is as keen and as much to 
the point now as in the time of Tiberius : — " Qui studium agricola- 
tioni dederit, sciat hcec sill advocanda : prudentiam rei, facultatem 
impendendi, voluntafcm agendi." 



214 MY FARM. 

success in agriculture, as in other business pursuits. 
This kind of enterprise is what farmers specially 
lack ; and the lack is due to the secure tenure by 
which they hold their property. The shopkeeper 
who turns his capital three or four times in a year, 
and who knows that an old stock of goods will 
involve heavy losses, is stimulated to constant 
activity and watchfulness. The farmer, on the other 
hand, inheriting his little patch of land, and feeling 
reasonably sure of his corn and bacon, and none of 
that incentive which attends risk, yields himself to a 
stolid indifference, that overlays all his faculties. 
Yet some of the Agricultural papers tell us with 
pride, that bankruptcies among farmers are rare. 
Pray why should they not be rare ? The man who 
never mounts a ladder, will most surely never have a 
fall from one. Dash, enterprise, spirit, wakefulness, 
have their hazards, and always will ; but if a man 
sleep, the worst that can befal him is only a bad 
dream. This lethargy on the part of so many who 
are content with their pork dinners and small spend, 
ings, is very harmful to the Agricultural interests of 
the country. Young America abhors sleepiness, and 
does not gravitate, of choice, toward a pursuit which 
seems to encourage it. The conclusion and the con- 
viction have been, with earnest young men, that a 
profession which did not stimulate to greater activity 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 215 

and larger triumphs, and a more Christian amplitude 
of life, could not be worth the following. Nothing 
about it or in it seemed to have affinity with the 
great springs of human progress otherwheres ; a 
lumpish, serf life, it seemed — bound to the glebe, 
and cropping its nourishment thence, like kine. 

Again, the extravagance of those who have 
undertaken farming as a mere amusement, has 
greatly damaged its character as a pursuit worthy 
the enlistment of earnest workers. Our friend, Mr. 
Tallweed, who, with his Wall-street honors fresh 
upon him, comes to the country to grow tomatoes at 
a cost of five dollars the dozen, and who puts a sack 
of superphosphate to a garden row of sweet corn, 
may make monstrosities for the exhibition tables, but 
he is not inviting emulation ; he is simply commit- 
ting an Agricultural debauch. And an Agricultural 
debauch pays no better than any other. 

But between these extremes, there is room for a 
sober business faculty, and for an array of good 
sense. With these two united, success may be 
counted on ; not brilliant perhaps, for in farming 
there are no opportunities for sudden or explosive 
success. The farmer digs into no gold lead. He 
springs no trap, like the lawyer or tradesmen. His 
successes, when most decided, are orderly, normal, 
and cumulative. He must needs bring a cool tern- 



216 MY FARM. 

per, and the capacity — to wait. If he plant a thous- 
and guineas — however judiciously, — they will not 
sprout to-morrow. There have been, I know, Multi- 
caulis fevers, and Peabody seedlings ; but these are 
exceptional ; and the prizes which come through 
subornation of the Patent Office, are rare, and dearly 
paid for. 

Again, it must be remembered, that all success 
depends more on the style of the man, than on the 
style of his business. For one who is thoroughly in 
earnest, farming offers a fair field for effort. But 
the man who is only half in earnest, who thinks that 
costly barns, and imported stock, and jaunty fencing, 
and a nicely-rolled lawn are the great objects of 
attainment, may accomplish pretty results ; but they 
will be small ones. 

So the dilettante farmer, who has a smattering 
of science, whose head is filled with nostrums, who 
thinks his salts will do it all ; who doses a crop — now 
to feebleness, and now to an unnatural exuberance ; 
who dawdles over his fermentations, while the neigh- 
bor's oxen are breaking into his rye field ; who has 
no managing capacity — no breadth of vision, — who 
sends two men to accomplish the work of one — let 
such give up all hope of making farming a lucra- 
tive pursuit. If, however, a man be thoroughly in 
earnest, if he have the sagacity to see all over his 



CROPS AND PROFITS. 217 

farm — to systematize his labor, to carry out his plans 
punctually and thoroughly ; if he is not above 
economies, nor heedless of the teachings of science, 
nor unobservant of progress otherwheres — let him 
work, — for he will have his reward. 

But even such an one may, very likely, never 
come to his " four in hand," except they be colts of 
his own raising ; or to private concerts in his grounds 
— except what the birds make. 



10 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 



IV. 

HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 



The Argument. 

IT will be perceived by the reader who has been 
kind enough to follow me thus far, that this 
book neither professes to be wholly practical, nor 
y et wholly fanciful. It is — if I may use a profes- 
sional expression — the fruit from a graft of the fan- 
ciful, set upon the practical ; and this is a style of 
grafting which is of more general adoption in the 
world than we are apt to imagine. Commercial life 
is not wholly free from this easy union, — nor yet the 
clerical. All speculative forays, whether in the 
southern seas or on the sea of metaphysics, are to be 
credited to the graft Fancy ; and all routine, whether 
of ledger or of liturgy, go to the stock-account of the 
Practical. Nor is the last necessarily always profit, 
and the other always loss. There are, I am sure, a 



222 MY FARM. 

great many Practical failures in the world, and the 
number of Fanciful successes is unbounded. 

I have endeavored more especially to meet and to 
guide, so far as I may, the mental drift of those who 
think of rural life, either present or prospective, — 
not as a mere money-making career (like a dip into 
mining) — nor yet as the idle gratification of a caprice. 
No sensible man who establishes himself in a country 
home, desires that the acres about him should prove 
wholly unremunerative, and simple conduits of his 
money ; nor yet does he wish to drive such a sharp 
bargain with his land as will cause his home to be 
shorn of all the luxuries, and the legitimate charms 
of a country life. It is needless to say that I hope 
for sensible readers, and direct my observations ac- 
cordingly. With this intent I propose, in this last 
division of my book, to review all the helps and hin- 
drances to the success and the rational enjoyment of 
a farm-life. I shall not reason the matter so closely 
as I might do, if I were addressing the attendants 
upon a County-Fair, but shall scatter my hints and 
experiences through a somewhat ample margin of 
illustrative text, from which the practical man may 
excerpt his little nuggets of information or sugges- 
tion, — as the case may be ; and the reader who is pas- 
torally inclined, may find frequent dashes of country 
perfume, that shall deftly cover the ammoniacal scents- 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 223 

Agricultural Chemistry. 

WHEN" a man buys clean copies of Liebig and 
of Boussingault, and walks into possession 
of his land with the books under his arm, and an 
assured conviction that with their aid, he is about to 
supplant altogether the old practice, and commit 
havoc with old theories, and raise stupendous crops, 
and drive all his old-fashioned neighbors to the wall, — 
he is laboring under a mistake. His calves will very- 
likely take the ' scours ; ' the cut-worms will slice off 
his phosphated corn ; the Irish maid will pound his 
cream into a frothy chowder ; — in which events he 
will probably lose his temper ; or, if a cool man, will 
retire under a tree, and read a fresh chapter out of 
Liebig. 

There are a great many contingencies about 
farming, which chemistry does not cover, and proba- 
bly never will. People talk of agricultural chemistry 
as if it were a special chemistry for the farmer's 
advantage. The truth is (and it was well set forth, I 
remember, in a lecture of Professor Johnson's), there 
is no such thing as agricultural chemistry ; and the 
term is not only a misnomer, but misleads egregious- 
ly. There is no more a chemistry of agriculture than 
there is a chemistry of horse-flesh, or a conchology 
of egg-shells. Chemistry concerns all organic and 



224 MY FARM. 

inorganic matters ; and, if you have any of these 
about your barn-yards, it concerns them ; it tells you 
— if your observation and experience can't determine 
— what they are. Of course it may be an aid to 
agriculture ; and so are wet-weather, and a good hoe, 
and grub, and common-sense, and industiy. It may 
explain things you would not otherwise understand ; 
it may correct errors of treatment ; it may protect 
you from harpies who vend patented manures — not 
because it is agricultural chemistry ; but, I should say 
rather, looking to a good deal of farm practice — be- 
cause it is not agricultural, and because it deals hi cer- 
tainties, and not plausibilities. There is such a thing 
as religion, and it helps, sometimes, to purify Demo- 
crats and sometimes Republicans ; but who thinks of 
talking — unless his head is turned — about democratic 
religion, or republican Christianity ? 

The error of the thing works ill, as all errors do 
in the end. It indoctrinates weak cultivators with 
the belief that the truths they find set down in 
agricultural chemistries, are agricultural truths, as 
well as chemical truths ; and thereupon, they mount 
a promising one as a hobby, and go riding to the 
wall. Chemistry is an exact science, and Agriculture 
is an experimental art, and always will be, until rains 
stop, and bread grows full-baked. A chemical truth 
is a truth for all the world and the ages to come ; 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 225 

and if you can use it in the making of shoe-blacking, 
or to dye your whiskers, — do so ; but don't for that 
reason call it Whisker-chemistry. 

It is a chemical truth that an alkali will neutralize 
an acid if you furnish enough of it ; and if, with that 
truth festering in your brain, you can contrive to 
neutralize your entire fund of oxalic-acid, so that no 
sorrel shall thenceforth grow, — pray do so. But I do 
not think you can ; and first, because the soil — to 
which quarter you would very naturally direct your 
alkaline attack — may be utterly free of any oxalic 
acid whatever ; its presence in the plant, is no 
evidence of its presence in the soil. Pears have a 
modicum of pectic acid at a certain stage of their 
ripeness, but I suspect it would puzzle a sharp chem- 
ist to detect any in the soil of a pear-orchard. And 
even if the acid were a mineral acid, and were neutral- 
ized — it must be remembered — that to neutralize, is 
only to establish change of condition, and not to de- 
stroy ; — how know you that the little fibrous rootlets 
will not presently be laying their fine mouths to the neu- 
tral base, and by a subtle alchemy of their own, work 
out such restoration as shall mock at your efforts — in 
all their rampant green, and their red tassels of bloom ? 
The presence of any particular substance in a 
crop, does not ipso facto, warrant the application of 
the same substance to the soil as the condition of in- 
10* 



226 MY FARM, 

creased vigor. The man who, — having retired to 
the shade for a fresh chapter of Liebig, — finds that 
cellulose enters largely into the structure of his 
plants, and thereupon gives his crops a dressing of 
clean, pine saw-dust, would very likely have his labor 
for his pains. That wonderful vital laboratory of 
the plant, has its own way of effecting combinations ; 
and stealing, as it does, the elements of its needed 
cellulose, in every laughing toss of its leaves — it 
scorns your offering. 

It is a chemical truth that the starch in potatoes 
or wheat, is the same thing with the woody fibre of 
a tree ; but it is not an agricultural fact — differs as 
widely from it in short, as a stiffened shirt-collar 
from the main-mast of a three-decker ship. A far- 
mer comes to the chemist with some dust or bolus 
from a far-away place, and asks what is in it ; he can 
tell upon examination, and if, after such examination 
he finds it to possess a large percentage of soluble 
phosphoric acid, he will advise its use as a manure, 
and can promise that it will contribute largely to the 
vigor of a wheat crop ; all this — not simply because 
phosphoric-acid is a constituent part of the grain, but 
because he knows that other dressings containing a 
like element, have invariably so contributed ; the 
fact being established by repeated farm-trials. But 
it is not a result determinable, so far as a field-crop 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 227 

is concerned, by simple chemical investigation ; nor 
could it be so determinable, unless you could estab- 
lish the crop and feed it, under those conditions of 
alienation from all other influences, by which or 
under which alone, the chemist is enabled to estab- 
lish the severity of his conclusions. 

The power of the chemist to decompose, to un- 
ravel, to tear in pieces, and to name and classify every 
separate part, is something wonderful ; but his power 
to combine is less miraculous. Give him all the car- 
bonic-acid in the world and he cannot make us a 
diamond, or a lump of charcoal. And when, with the 
natural combination is associated a vital principle, 
(as in plants), controlling, amplifying, decomposing 
at its will, his power shrinks into still smaller dimen- 
sions. Faithful and long-continued observation of 
the mysterious processes of nature, will alone justify 
a theory of plant-nutrition. A large part of this ob- 
servation is supplied by the history of farm-ex- 
periences, and another part is supplied by the earnest 
investigations of special scientific inquirers. Where 
the two tally and sustain each other, — one may be- 
sure of standing upon safe ground. But where they 
are antagonistic, one has need to weigh conflicting evi- 
dence well, not presuming hastily that either practical 
experience, or a special science has, as yet, a mo- 
nopoly of all the truths which lie at the base of the 



228 MY FARM. 

"mystery of husbandry." For these reasons it is, 
that I say, — let no man rashly hope to revolutionize 
farming, upon the strength of clean copies of Liebig 
and Boussingault. 

A Gypseous Illustration. 

THE farming community has a great respect for 
men of science ; it never thinks of distrusting 
any of their dicta, so long as they are conveyed in 
scientific and only half-intelligible language. The 
working-farmer is altogether too busy and shrewd 
a man to controvert a statement of which he has 
only vague and muddy comprehension. His dignity 
is saved, by bowing acquiescence, and passing it un- 
challenged. Thus, — if the Professor, talking in the 
interests of agriculture, says : " Gypsum is very ser- 
viceable in fixing the ammonia which is brought 
down from the atmosphere by showers," the com- 
mon-sense farm-listener is disposed to admit so airy 
a truth. But if the Professor, meeting him over the 
fence, says : " Plaster is an excellent manure," the 
common-sense man retorts : 

"Waal — d'n'know; depends a leetle upon the 
sile, in my opinion." 

But as the scientific man confines himself mostly 
to the language of the desk, and meets with an ad- 
miring assent; he is apt, I think, to geDeralize some- 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 229 

what too loosely and rashly in his theories of applied 
science. Naturally enough, confident in the results 
of his own investigation, he entertains a certain con- 
tempt for a merely empirical art ; he undervalues the 
experience and practices of its patrons, and proposes 
to lay down a law for them, which, having scientific 
truth for its basis, may work unvarying results. I 
do not know how I can better illustrate this, than by 
noticing some of the various theories which have 
obtained, in respect to the fertilizing action of 
gypsum. 

A farmer, for instance, finds himself within easy 
reach of a large supply of this salt, and being chemi- 
cally inclined, he sets himself to the task of reading 
what has been written on the subject,— in the hope, 
possibly, of astounding the neighbors, and glutting 
the corn market. 

At the outset I may remark, that farm-experience 
has as yet found no law by which to govern the 
application of gypsum ; on one field it succeeds ; in 
another, to all appearance precisely the same, it fails ; 
at one time it would seem as if its efficacy depended 
on showers following closely upon its application ; 
in other seasons, showers lose their effect. In one 
locality, a few bushels to the acre work strange 
improvement, and in another, fifty bushels work no 
change whatever. Now — it is a hill pasture that de- 



230 MY FARM. 

lights in it, and again — it is an alluvial meadow. 
Hence it offers peculiarly one of those cases, where 
an observant and earnest farmer would be desirous 
of calling in the aid of scientific opinion. 

And what will he find ? 

Sir Humphry Davy, that devout old gentleman, 
who was as good an angler as he was chemist, ex- 
ploded the idea prevalent in his day — that gypsum 
was beneficial by promoting putrefaction of manurial 
substances — and expressed the opinion that it was 
absorbed by the plants bodily ; at least by those 
plants whose ash showed large percentage of sul- 
phate of lime. Sir Humphry was honest ; the 
theory was not too absurd ; the farmers were doubt- 
less glad to get a handle to their talk about plaster ; 
and so for a dozen years or more, the lucerne and 
clover went on absorbing the gypsum. At last 
some inquisitive party ascertained, by careful experi- 
ment, that a field of clover not treated with gypsum, 
contained as large a percentage of sulphate of lime in 
its ash, as another field which had been treated to 
the salt. The inference was plain, that the superior 
vigor of the last was not attributable to simple 
absorption of the sulphate, and the theory of Davy 
quietly lapsed. 

Chaptal, the French chemist, speaks of gypsum in 
a loose way as a stimulator ; but in what particular 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 231 

direction its stimulating qualities are supposed to 
work, he does not inform us. 

About the year 1840, I think, Dr. Dana, of Low- 
ell, published a bouncing little book called a Muck 
Manual, in which he affirmed very stoutly that gyp- 
sum was quietly decomposed by the roots of the 
plants, when its sulphuric acid flew off at the silicates, 
and worried them into soluble shape ; and its lime, 
on the other side, flew off at the geine, pounding 
that into a good relish ; in short, he made out so charm- 
ing a little theory, — so vivacious in its action, — so 
appetizing to turnips, and so authoritatively stated, 
that we farmers must needs accept it at a glance, and 
take off our hats, with—" That's it,"— " I thought so," 
— " The very thing." 

But straight upon this, like a thunder-clap, comes 
Liebig,* who declares, in his authoritative way, that 
the value of gypsum " is due to its faculty of fixing 
the small quantity of carbonate of ammonia, brought 
down by the rain and the dew ; " at this, we farmers 
put on our hats again, and waited for the rain. 

Some two or three years after, M. Boussingault, 
who had gone through the South-American wars 
under Bolivar, and studied agriculture at Quito, as 
well as on his own country-estate of Bechelbron, 

* His first book appeared in America, if I am not mistaken, 
in 1841. 



232 MY FARM 

entertains us with the report, — in his mildly authorita- 
tive way, and sustained by great weight of evidence, 
— that Dr. Liebig is utterly wrong in his theory, 
and that the value of gypsum is due entirely to the 
lime which it introduces into the soil ; — the sulphuric 
acid, which played such a lively game under the pen 
of Dr. Dana — counting for nothing. 

By the time this stage of the inquiry is reached, 
the investigating young farmer, with whom I entered 
upon this illustration, might be safely supposed to 
be slightly muddled ; and yet, with a comparatively 
clear recollection of the last-presented theory in his 
mind, he might farther be supposed to consider the 
propriety of buying lime at eight cents a bushel, 
rather than gypsum at sixty cents. 

But he has hardly formed this decision, and seen 
his lime dumped upon his clover-field, when he 
receives a copy of Dr. Liebig's final work upon the 
Natural Laws of Husbandry. Turning with nervous 
haste to the Doctor's discussion of the sulphate of 
lime, he finds these startling statements : " It may be 
safely assumed that in cases where gypsum is found 
to be favorable to the growth of clover, the cause 
must not be sought for in the lime ; and since arable 
soil has the property of absorbing ammonia from the 
air and rain water, and fixing it in a higher degree 
than salts of lime, there is only the sulphuric acid 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 233 

left to look to for an explanation of the favorable ac- 
tion of gypsum." 

And in this muddle I leave our young farmer, 
contemplating, in an abstracted manner, his lime 
heap, and reflecting upon the wonders of nature. 

Yet it is not altogether a muddle. Science has 
failed in substantiating a theory of action — only where 
all farm experience is equally at fault ; when the two 
march together, they pluck up triumphs by the roots. 
The particular action of gypsum, with a safe rule for 
its application, remains one of the mysteries of the 
craft ; and there are a great many others. Science is 
not discredited, however, by the antagonism of such 
men as Liebig and Boussingault. Stout men will 
stagger, when they explore the way for us into the 
dark. The dignity of science will suffer more from 
the pestilent iteration of smatterers who presume to 
solve all the riddles of nature in their own little 
retorts. And the danger is all the greater from the 
fact that uninstructed farmers render an instinctive 
respect and confidence to a man who professes 
familiarity with science. It is never imagined by 
them, that one who would write C 8 H 4 3 -|-2HO 
for malic acid, — would tell an untruth or take airs 
upon himself. Yet I think it may be safely 
conceded that a rash man, or a mischievous man 
may cover falsehood under such formulae, as easily 



234 MY FARM. 

— as if lie edited a morning paper. And I really 
do not know how I could put the matter more 
strongly. 

With respect to gypsum, — and in close of this 
special topic, — I may say that I have found it some- 
times of service upon young clover, and sometimes 
of no service at all. Upon old pasture land, it has, 
with me, uniformly counted for nothing ; and again, 
I have never failed to find an appreciable increase of 
the crop of potatoes, where I have sown gypsum in 
the trenches at planting. It is certain that we have 
no right to condemn the salt, simply because we 
cannot detect the precise mode of its operation. That 
mode, I am inclined to believe very complex, and 
that no uniform law will ever meet the requirements 
of the case ; nor have I a doubt but that in process 
of time, and under the tests of a future and finer 
chemistry, and of a fuller experience, every one of 
the dilute theories named, will throw down its little 
flocculent precipitate of truth. 

Science and Practice. 

I REMEMBER once, in company with a crowd 
of interested auditors, listening to a justly 
distinguished pomologist, who, in the course of his 
peroration in praise of scientific study, suggested the 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 235 

great advantage of analyzing all the different pears, 
and the different soils under culture, so that they 
might be minutely adjusted each to each. Of course 
the worthy old gentleman never did such a thing ; 
and (being a shrewd man) never means to. Yet it 
seemed not a very bad thing — to say. The lesser 
pomologists all wagged their heads approvingly, but 
without any serious thought of following the advice ; 
the embryo chemists fairly gushed over in approval ; 
and the only doubt expressed, was in the faces of cer- 
tain earnest, honest, old farmers, — who had already 
paid their twenty-five dollars for a soil analysis, to 
the eminent Professor Mapes, — and of one or two 
scientific adepts, who, I thought, gave a twirl to their 
tongues in the left cheek, — rather evasively. In 
general, I find that the most modest opinions in regard 
to the agricultural aids of applied science, come from 
the men of most distinguished scientific attainment ; 
and the exaggerated promises and suggestions flow 
from those who are slightly indoctrinated, and who 
make up by uproar of words, and aggregation of pre- 
tentious claims, for the quiet confidence and far-sight- 
ed moderation of real science. Even so we find a 
General in command — looking from end to end of the 
field — modest in his promises, doubtful by reason of 
his knowledge ; while some blatant Colonel, puffy 
with regimental valor, and knowing the positions only 
9* 



236 MY FARM. 

by the confused roar of artillery, will pompously 
threaten to bag every man of the enemy ! 

But aside from the exaggeration alluded to, — and 
of which I should reckon so minute a soil-analysis 
as to determine what ground would most favor the 
development of jpeetose in a baking pear, and of pectic 
acid in a Bartlett, a fair sample, — there are other 
hindrances to the effective and profitable co-labora- 
tion of scientific men with the practical farmer. The 
latter has a wall about him of self-confidence, igno- 
rance of technicals, great common-sense, and awkward 
prejudices, which the scientific man, with his preci- 
sion, his fineness of observation, his remote analogies, 
and his impatience of guess-work, is not accustomed 
or fitted to undermine. He may breach indeed suc- 
cessfully all the old methods, but if the old methodist 
does not detect, or recognize the breach, what boots 
it ? Science must stoop to the work, and show him 
a corn crop that is larger and grown more cheaply 
than his own ; this is sending a shot home. 

Let me illustrate, by a little talk, which I think 
will have the twang of realism about it. 

A shrewd chemist, devoting himself to the mis- 
sionary work of building up farming by the aid of 
his science, pays a parochial visit to one of the back- 
sliders whom he counts most needful of reformation. 
The backslider, — I will call him Nathan, — is breaking 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 237 

up a field, and is applying the manure in an unfer- 
mented and unctuous state ; — the very act of sinning, 
according to the particular theory of our chemist, 
perhaps, who urges that manures should be applied 
only after thorough fermentation. 

He approaches our ploughing farmer with a 
" Good morning." 

"Mornin'," returns Nathan (who never wastes 
words in compliment). 

" I see you use your manure unfermented." 

" Waal, I d'n'know — guess it's about right ; smells 
pooty good, doan't it ? " 

" Yes, but don't you lose something in the smell?" 

" Waal, d'n'know ; — kinder hard to bottle much 
of a smell, ain't it ? " 

" But why don't you compost it ; pack up your 
long manure with turf and muck, so that they will 
absorb the ammonia ? " 

" The what ?— (Gee, Bright ! )" 

" Ammonia ; precisely what makes the guano act 
so quickly." 

" Ammony, is it ? Waal, — guanner has a pooty 
good smell tew ; my opinion is, that manure ought to 
have a pooty strong smell, or 'taint good for nuthin'." 

Scientific gentleman a little on the hip ; but re- 
vives under the pungency of the manure. 

" But if you were to incorporate your long manure 



238 MY FARM. 

with turf and other material, you would make the 
turf good manure, and put all in a better state for 
plant food." 

" Waal — (considering) — I've made compo's afore 
now ; — dooz pooty well for garden sass and sich like, 
but it seems to me kinder like puttin' water to half 
a glass o' sperit ; it makes a drink a plaguey sight 
stronger'n water, no doubt o' that ; but after all 's 
said and dun, — 'taint so strong as the rum. (Haw, 
Buck ; why don't ye haw ! )" 

Scientific gentleman wipes his spectacles, but fol- 
lows after the plough. 

" Do you think, neighbor, you're ploughing this 
sod as deeply as it should be ? " 

"Waal— (Gee, Bright !)— it's as folks think; I 
doan't like myself to turn up much o' the yaller ; it's 
a kind o' cold sile." 

" Yes, but if you exposed it to the air and light, 
wouldn't it change character, and so add to the depth 
of your land ? " 

" Doant know but it might ; but I ha'n't much 
opinion o' yaller dirt, nohow ; I kinder like to put 
my corn and potatoes into a good black sile, if I can 
get it." 

" But color is a mere accidental circumstance, and 
has no relation to the quality of the soil." 

(" Gee, Bright ! gee ! ") 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 239 

" There are a great many mineral elements of 
food lying below, which plants seek after ; don't you 
find your clover roots running down into the yellow 
soil ? " 

" Waal, clover's a kind of a tap-rooted thing, — 
nateral for it to run down ; but if it runs down arter 
the yaller, what's the use o' bringin' on it up ? " 

The scientific gentleman sees his chance for a 
dig. 

" But if you can make the progress of the roots 
easier by loosening the sub-soil, or incorporating a 
portion of it with the upper soil, you increase the 
facilities for growth, and enlarge your crops." 

" Waal, that's kinder rash'nal ; and ef I could find 
a man that would undertake to do a little of the 
stirrin' of the yaller, without bringin' much on't up, 
and bord himself, I'd furnish half the team and let 
him go ahead." 

" But wouldn't the increased product pay for all 
the additional labor ? " 

" Doant b'lieve it would, nohow, between you 
and I. You see, you gentlemen with your pockets 
full o' money (scientific gentleman coughs — slightly), 
talk about diggin' here and diggin' there, and turnin > 
up the yaller, and making compo's, but all that takes 
a thunderin' sight o' work. (Gee, Bright ! — g'lang, 
Buck ! )" 



240 MY FARM. 

The scientific gentleman wipes his spectacles, and 
tries a new entering wedge. 

" How do you feed your cattle, neighbor ? " 

" Waal, good English hay ; now and then a bite 
o' oats, 'cordin' as the work is." 

" But do you make no beeves ? " 

« Heh ? " 

" Do you fatten no cattle ? " 

" Yaas, long in the fall o' the year I put up four 
or five head, about the time turnips are comin' in." 

" And have you ever paid any attention to their 
food with reference to its fat-producing qualities, or 
its albuminoids ? " 

" (Gee, Bright !)— bumy— what ? " 

" Albuminoids — name given to flesh producers, in 
distinction from oily food." 

" Oh, — never used 'em. Much of a feed ? (G'lang, 
Buck ! )" 

" They are constituent parts of a good many 
varieties of food ; but they go only to make muscle ; 
it isn't desirable you know to lay on too much fatty 
matter." 

" Heh ?— keep off the fat do they ? (Gee, Bright !) 
Dum poor feed, then, in my opinion." 

By this time the end of the furrow is reached, 
and the scientific gentleman walks pensively toward 
the fence, while Nathan's dog that has been sleeping 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 241 

under a tree, wakes up, and sniffs sharply at the 
bottom of the stranger's pantaloons. 

I have written thus much, in this vein, to show 
the defensible position of many of the old style 
farmers, crusted over with their prejudices — many of 
them well based, it must be admitted — and armed 
with an inextinguishable shrewdness. The only way 
to prick through the rind is to show them a big crop 
grown at small cost, and an orderly and profitable 
method, gradually out-ranking their slatternly hus- 
bandry. Nor can I omit to say in this connection, 
that the free interchange of questions and answers, 
and unstarched companionship, which belonged to the 
ISTew Haven Agricultural Convention of 1860, are 
among the best means of breaking down the walls 
of demarcation, and establishing chemical affinities 
between Science and Practice. 

Lack of Precision. 

THE manufacturer, in ordinary times, can tell us 
with a good deal of certainty how much work 
he can turn out in any given month, and what his 
profits will be. The farmer, whose crops are depend- 
ent in a greater or less degree upon contingencies of 
wet, or rain, or cold, over which he has no control, is 
less positive ; and as a consequence, I think, he grows 
11 



242 MY FARM. 

into an exceedingly loose habit of thought in all that 
regards his affairs. Notwithstanding his punctilious- 
ness in moneyed details, and his sharpness at a bar- 
gain, he has a more vague idea of his real where- 
abouts in the world of profit and loss, than any man 
of equal capital that you can find. If he has a little 
pile in stocking-legs or in Savings that grows, — -it is 

profit ; if he has a little debt at the grocer's or the 
bank that grows, — it is loss. 

There is not one in fifty who can tell with any- 
thing approaching to accuracy, how much his grain 
or roots cost him the bushel ; not one in fifty who 
can show anything like a passable balance sheet of a 
year's transactions. He may put down all the money 
he receives in stumpy figures, and all the money he 
pays out in other stumpy figures, and set his oldest 
boy to the Christmas reckoning. But his rent, his 
personal labor, the wear and tear, the waste, the con- 
sumption, the unmarketed growth, assume only a 
hazy indeterminate outline, within which the sum of 
the stumpy figures is lost. Whether he is raising 
com at a price larger than the market one, or selling 
potatoes for a third less than they cost him, is an 
inquiry he never submits to the fatigue and precision 
of accurate investigation. He thinks matters are 
about so and so ; his oxen are worth about so much ; 
his oats will turn about thirtv bushels to the acre. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 248 

Nay, he carries this looseness of language into 
matters of positive knowledge ; the straightest stick 
of timber in the world is only about straight, and the 
politicians are about as dishonest as they well can be. 

Suppose we try him upon his corn crop ; we sub- 
mit that it looks a little yellow. 

" Waal— yes, kinder yeller ; t'ain't fairly caught 
hold o' the dung yit " (pegging away with his hoe). 

" Do you think there's any profit in growing corn, 

hereabout ? " 

"Waal— don't know as there is much; kinder 
like to make a little pork, and have a little about for 

the hens." 

" But why not buy your corn and raise something 
else, provided you can buy it, as you often can, for 
sixty or seventy cents the bushel." 

" Waal— kinder like to have a little ' heater ' piece ; 
the boys, you see, hoe it out in odd spells ; don't pay 
out much for help." 

" But the boys could earn their seventy-five cents 

a day, couldn't they ? " 

" Waal— suppose they might— about ; but kinder 
like to have 'em about home." 

" Have you ever tried carrots ? " 

"Waal — no; kinder back-achin' work to weed 

carrits." 

And not only does this apathetic indifference to 



244 MY FARM. 

the relative profits of different crops prevail, but there 
is no proper business estimate of home labor. 

We often see it affirmed, admiringly, that such 
or such a man has built an enormous quantity of wall 
— so many feet high and broad — or dug out so many 
rocks, and mostly with his own hands, or in spare 
time with his own ' help ' ; in short, it is intimated 
that all is done at little expense. Now this is very 
absurd ; great work involves great labor ; and great 
labor has its price. You may do it in the night, and 
call it no labor ; you may do it yourself, and call it no 
expense ; but there is, nevertheless, a great deal of 
positive expenditure of both muscle and time which, 
if not given to this work, might have been given to 
another. It may count much for your industry, but 
not one whit for your farming, until we learn if the 
labor has been judiciously expended — has paid, in 
short. And to determine this, we must estimate the 
labor at its market value — whether done in the night, 
or on holidays. 

If I see a house painted all over in diamonds of 
every hue, and express distaste for the wanton waste 
of labor, it is no answer to me to say — that the man 
did it in odd hours. What will not pay for doing in 
even hours, will never pay for doing in odd hours. 
It is no excuse for waste of time and muscle, to waste 
them in the dark. Every spade or hammer -stroke 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 245 

upon the farm — no matter whether done by the 
master or the master's son, or master's wife — no 
matter whether done after hours or before hours — 
must be estimated at the sum such labor would com- 
mand in the market. 

The fallacy is only another indication of that 
woful lack of precision of which I have been speak- 
ing, and which, I am sorry to say, infects more or less 
the current Agricultural literature. A well-meaning 
man gives some account of an experiment that he 
has undertaken, and is so loose in statement of 
details, so inexplicit, so neglectful to make known 
previous conditions of soil, or conditions of cost, that 
he might as well have burst a few soap-bubbles in 
the face of the public. 

Even in reports of State societies, the estimate of 
labor and other expenses on premium-crops is so 
various, so conflicting, often so patently and egre- 
giously wrong, that it is quite impossible to arrive 
even at a safe average. I find among these reports, 
the calculation of some short-figured farmer, who has 
competed for a premium upon his carrots, and who 
has the effrontery to put down the cost of cultivating 
and harvesting an acre — at twenty dollars ! Yet he 
won his premium, and the estimate stands recorded. 
The committee who audited and accepted such a 
report — if donkeys were on exhibition — should have 
been put round the track. 



246 MY FARM. 



Knowing too Much. 

SOMETIMES see in the papers, advertisements 
of gardeners, who can be seen at Thorburn's, 
in John street, on stated mornings, when they hold 
their levee, who insist upon ' entire control.' A 
modest man, going among them, and entreating the 
services of one at forty dollars a month, and ' boord,' 
feels very much as if he were hiring himself to him 
in some subordinate capacity, — with the privilege of 
occasionally sniffing the perfume through the open 
doors of the green-house. There may be those 
country-lovers who enjoy this state of dependence 
upon the superior authority of a gardener ; but I do 
not care to be counted among them. I have too large 

an acquaintance among the sufferers. M , an 

amiable gentleman, and a friend of mine, and an ex- 
treme lover of flowers, dared no more to pick a rose 
without permission of ' Wallace,' than he dares to 
be caught reading an unpopular journal. ' Wallace ' 
is instructed ; but in the assertion of his authority, 
— impudent. And when at last my friend summoned 
resolution to dismiss him, there came a dray to the 
back-entrance, which was presently loaded down 
with the private cuttings and perquisites of the ac- 
complished gardener. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 247 

When a gardener knows so much as to refuse any 
suggestions, and to disallow any right on the part of 
the proprietor to stamp his place with his own indi- 
viduality of taste, — he knows altogether too much. 
This is the Scotch phase of knowing too much ; but 
there is an American one that is even worse, and 
which puts a raw edge upon country socialities. 

I find no man so disagreeable to meet with, as 
one who knows everything. Of course we expect it 
in newspaper editors, and allow for it. But, to meet 
a man engaged in innocent occupations — over your 
fence, who is armed cap-a-pie against all new ideas, — 
who ' knew it afore,' or ' has heerd so,' or doubts 
it, or replies to your most truthful sally c t'ain't so, 
nuther,' is aggravating in the extreme. 

There is many a small farmer, scattered up and 
down hi New England, whose chief difficulty is — 
that he knows too much. I do not think a single 
charge against him could cover more ground, or 
cover it better. It is hard to make intelligible to a 
third party, his apparent inaccessibility to new ideas, 
his satisfied quietude, his invincible inertium, his 
stolid, and yet shrewd capacity to resist novelties, 
his self-assurance, his scrutinizing contempt for out- 
sidedness of whatever sort — his supreme and ineradi- 
cable faith in his own peculiar doctrine, whether of 
politics, religion, ethnology, ham-curing, manuring, 
or fanning generally. 



248 MY FARM. 

It is not alone that men of this class cling by a 
particular method of culture, because their neighbor- 
hood has followed the same for years, and the results 
are fair ; but it is their pure contempt for being 
taught ; their undervaluation of what they do not 
know, as not worth knowing ; their conviction that 
their schooling, their faith, their principles, and their 
understanding are among God's best works ; and 
that other peoples' schooling, faith, principles, and 
views of truth — whether human or Divine — are in- 
ferior and unimportant. 

Yet withal, there is a shrewdness about them 
which forces upon you the conviction that they do 
not so much dislike to be taught, as dislike to seem 
to be taught. They like to impress you with the 
notion that what you may tell them is only a new 
statement of what they know already. It is incon- 
ceivable that anything really worth knowing has not 
come within the range of their opportunities ; or if 
not theirs, then of their accredited teachers, the town 
school-master, the parson, the doctor, or the news- 
paper. In short, all that they do not know which 
may be worth knowing, is known in their town, and 
they are in some sort partners to it. 

Talk to a small farmer of this class about Mechi, 
or Lawes, or the new theory of Liebig, and he gives 
a complacent, inexorable grin — as much as to say — 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 249 

" Can't come that staff over me ; I'm too old a 
bird." 

So indeed he is ; and a tough bird at that. His 
mind is a rare psychological study ; so balanced on 
so fine a point, so immovable, — with such guys of pre- 
judice staying him on every side, — so subtle and yet 
so narrow, — so shrewd and yet so small, — so intelli- 
gent and yet so short-sighted If such men could 
bring themselves to think they knew less, I think 
they would farm far better. 

Opportunity for Culture. 

THERE is a plentiful crop of orators for all the 
agricultural fairs (most of them city lawyers, 
not knowing a Devon from a Hereford), who delight 
in expatiating upon the opportunities for culture 
afforded by the quiet and serenity of a farm-life. 
Now there is no life in the world, which, well hus- 
banded, has not its opportunities for culture ; but to 
say that the working-farmer's life is specially favored 
in this respect, is the grossest kind of an untruth. 

Long evenings, forsooth ! And the orator 

who talks in this style is probably crawling out of his 
bed at eight in the morning, while the farmer is 
a-field since four. And are not these four hours to 
be made good to him in sleep or rest? The man 
11* 



250 MY FARM. 

who rises at four, and works all day, as farmers 
work, or who is even a-field all day, is sleepy at nine 
P. M. It is not, perhaps, a graceful truth ; but it is 
a physiological one. Nothing provokes appetite for 
sleep so much, as out-of-door life. You may over- 
strain the nervous system, and dodge the night ; but 
a strain upon the muscular system must have its 
balance of repose. There are, indeed, exceptional 
cases, where a working man with an undue prepon- 
derance of brain, will steal hours between his labor 
for intellectual cultivation ; but he does it under 
difficulties, which he is the first to recognize and de- 
plore. Even the most skilled of working farmers 
arrive at their conclusions by an intuitive sagacity, 
which is wholly remote from the logical processes 
of books ; and their straight-forward common-sense, 
however correct in its judgments, grows into a dis- 
taste for the subtle arts of rhetoric. 

During the more leisure period of winter, the 
practical mind of the farmer will gravitate more 
easily toward mechanical employments, than toward 
those which are intellectual. He will have his 
Agricultural-journal and others, may be, to whose 
reading he will bring a ripe and hardy judgment. 
But his thoughts will be more among his cattle and 
his bins, than among books. " He cannot get wis- 
dom that glorieth in the goad, and that driveth oxen." 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 251 

There may be a spice of exaggeration in the dogma 
of Ecclesiasticus ; but whoever undertakes the pro- 
fession of working- farmer, must accept its fatigues 
and engrossments, and honor them as he can. It 
is a business that will not be halved. Vulcan can 
make no Ganymede — strain as he will. The horny 
hands, the tired body, the hay-dust and the scent of 
the stables are inevitable. The fine young fellow, 
flush with Johnston's Elements, and buoyant with 
Thomson's Seasons, may rebel at this view of the 
case ; but let him take three hours in a hay-field of 
August — behind a revolver (rake), with the reins 
over his neck, the land being lumpy, and the colt 
dipping a foot over the traces at the end of every 
bout, and I think he will have sweaty confirmation 
of its general truth. Or let him try a day at the tail 
of a Michigan-plough, in a wiry and dusty last-year's 
stubble : — the horses are fresh and well trained, and 
the plough enters bravely to its work — smoothly at 
first, but presently an ugly stone flings it cleanly from 
the farrow, and there is a backing, — a heavy tug, and 
on he goes with his mind all centred in the plough - 
beam, and nervously watching its little pitches and 
yaws ; he lifts a hand cautiously to wipe the perspi- 
ration from his forehead (a great imprudence), and the 
plough sheers over gracefully, and is out once more. 
There is a new backing and straining, and the plough 



252 MY FARM 

is again in place ; no more wiping of the forehead 
until the headlands are reached. Watery blisters are 
rising fast on his hands, and a pebble in his shoe is 
pressing fearfully on a bunion ; but at the headland 
he finds temporary relief, and a small can of weak 
barley-water. Refreshed by this, but somewhat 
shaky in the legs, he pushes on with zeal — possibly 
thinking of Burns, and how he walked in glory and 
in joy, 

" Behind his plough, 
Upon the mountain side," 

— and wondering if he really did? There are no 
4 wee-tipped ' daisies to beguile him ; not a mouse is 
stirring ; only a pestilent mosquito is twanging some- 
where behind his left ear, and a fine aromatic powder 
rises from the dusty stubble and tickles his nostrils. 
So he comes to the headland once more and the can ; 
if he had a copy of Burns in his pocket, it might be 
pleasant for the fine young fellow to lie off under the 
shade for a while, and ' improve his mind.' But he 
has no Burns — in fact, no pocket in his overalls ; be- 
sides which, the season is getting late ; he must finish 
his acre of ploughing. Over and over he eyes the sun 
— it is very slow of getting to its height, and when 
noon comes it finds him in a very draggled and wilty 
state ; but he mounts one of the horses, and the mate 
clattering after, he leads off to the barn and the bait 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 253 

ing. He has a sharp appetite for the beef and the 
greens, but not much, at the nooning, for Burns or 
Bishop Butler. The return to the field haunts him ; 
but the work is only half done. Rubbing his puffy 
hands with a raw onion (by the advice of Pat), he 
enters bravely upon a new bout of the ploughing. 
The sun is even more searching than in the morning ; 
the mosquitoes have come in flocks ; the bunion, ag- 
gravated by the morning's pebble, angers him sorely, 
and destroys all his confidence in the commentators 
upon Burns. 

At night, more draggled and wilted than at 
noon, he turns out his team, and if he means system- 
atic farm-work, will give the horses a thorough rub- 
bing-down ; afterward, if he cherish cleanly preju- 
dices, — the fine young fellow will have need for a 
rubbing-down of himself. This refreshes, and gives 
courage for the milking — which, with those puffy 
fingers, is no way amusing. Again the appetite is good 
— even for a cut of salt-beef, and dish of cold greens. 
Thereupon Pat, the Irish lad, sits upon the doorstep 
and ruminates, — with a short, black pipe in his mouth. 
Our draggled young friend aims at something better ; 
it is wearily done ; but at least the show shall be 
made. The candle is lighted, and a book pulled down 
— possibly Prof. Johnson on Peats ; the millers dart 
into the flame : peats, and hydrates, and oxides, and 



254 MY FARM. 

peats again, mix strangely; a horned beetle dashes 
at his forehead, and makes him wakeful for a mo- 
ment ; there is a frog droning in the near pond very 
drowsily — ' peats — peats — peats ; ' the drift of the 
professor is lost ; Pat ruminates on the step ; a big 
miller flaps out the flame of his candle ; — it is no mat- 
ter — our fine young fellow is in a sound snooze. 

So much for the working farmer ; and we cannot 
have armies without privates ; and privates are many 
of them ' fine young fellows.' 

Isolation of Farmers. 

I AM reminded that a farmer has no need to fag 
himself with hard field work. To a certain 
extent this is true ; but only " A master's eye fattens 
the horse, and only a master's foot the ground." 

If farming be undertaken as an amusement, ab- 
sence is possible ; indeed, the longer the absence, the 
greater the amusement — to the onlookers ; but if 
farming be undertaken as a business, presence is im- 
perative — presence, with its associations, and its com- 
parative isolation. 

Of the more familiar associations, a type may be 
had in Pat, sitting on the doorstep at dusk, ruminat- 
ing and smoking a black-stemmed pipe. The isola- 
tion is less obvious, but more galling. Farms do not 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 255 

lie extensively in cities ; and the least fear we live 
under, — is one of mobs. In fact, there is not even a 
habit of congregation in farmers. They meet behind 
the church, between services, — in a starched way ; 
they drive to town-meetings in their best toggery, and 
discuss ballotings and the weather — possibly linger an 
hour or two about the tavern or a pet grocer's ; but 
they do not meet as townspeople meet — on the walk, 
over counters, on the railway, in the omnibus, and in 
each other's houses. I have already taken occasion to 
dust out their darkened parlors ; but the dust will 
gather again. They have no Market-Fairs* which will 
bring them together with samples of their crops, to 
compare notes, and prices, and methods of culture. 

There is no coherence of the farmers as a body — 
no trade-guild — no banding of endeavor to work a 
common triumph, or to ferret out a common abuse. 
For years, in many parts of New England, the sheep 
culture has been entirely ruined by the ravages of 
lawless town-dogs ; and the farmers groan over it, 
and bury the dead sheep, and whisper valorously be- 
tween church services about bludgeons and buck- 

* A strong effort, I am glad to see, is making to establish them 
in various parts of the country. In my own neighborhood the old 
town of Cheshire has made a bold stride in this direction, and I 
trust not in vain. They are worth more to the true interests of 
farming than all the horse-trotting fairs which could be packed inta 
a season. 



256 MY FARM. 

shot, but never make a concerted urgent protest ; 01 
if they rally so far as to send one of their own people 
to the Legislature, — he, poor fellow, does not pass ten 
days under the fingers of the lobbyists, but he sinks 
into the veriest dribblet of a politician ; and gives 
the last proof of it, by making a pompous speech 
on ' Federal Relations,' — not worth the carcass of a 
ewe lamb. 

Under these conditions, any new and valuable 
methods of farm-practice do not spread with any 
rapidity ; they hobble lamely over innumerable flank- 
ing walls. It is possible they may get an airing in 
the Agricultural journals ; but good and serviceable 
as these journals are, their statements do not influ- 
ence, like personal communications. Reforms want 
the ring of spoken words, and some electric social 
chain traversing a whole district, and flashing with 
neighborly talk. 

The man of education, giving himself over to the 
retirement of a farm-life, will find this isolation, soon- 
er or later, grating sorely. Whatever love of the pur- 
suit — its cares, indulgences, attractions, successes — 
may engross him, a certain attrition with the world is 
as necessary to his mental health, and briskness of 
thought — as a rubbing-post for his pigs. He may let 
himself off in newspapers, or he may thumb his library 
and the journals, but these offer but dead contact, and 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 251 

possess none of that kindling magnetism which comes 
from personal intercourse. Type grows wearisome 
at last, however stocked with information and 
gorgeous fancies ; and a man frets for the lively re- 
bound of discussion. 

Friends from the city may drop upon you from 
time to time, exercising this compassion for your re- 
tirement ; and they treat you compassionately. Of 
course the novelty of the scene and the life has charms 
for any metropolitan, whatever his tastes ; and he 
bears himself very briskly at the first. The view is 
charming ; the well-water is charming ; the big oaks 
(they are all maples) are charming. And his eye 
falls upon a riotous hedge of Osage-orange, " Dear 
me, that's the hawthorn ; how beautiful it is ! " 

Of course you do not correct him ; in fact, you 
partake of his exhilaration, and seem to see things 
with new eyes. 

" And, bless me, here's your boy (its a girl) ; how 
old is he ? " (patting her head). 

What a fine flow of spirits he is in, to be sure ! 
You show him up and down your grounds (always 
' your grounds,' he calls them, if it be only a potato 
garden) . 

Presently his eye lights upon a blooming Weigelia. 
" Ah, a dwarf apple ! and do you go largely into 
fruit ? " upon which you offer him a Red-Astrachan, 



258 MY FARM. 

and remark that the Weigelia has not borne thus far ; 
it is a Chinese shrub, and little understood as yet. 

" Is it possible — Chinese ! so far ; — it seems to 
thrive." And it does. 

And you stroll with him upon the hill ; though 
you cannot but see that his mind is warping back to 
4 laryngal affections,' or ' half-of-one-per-cent. off.' 

A lucky interruption appears, in the shape of a 
fine Devon cow. You venture to call his attention to 
her, and ask if she is not a fine animal ? 

" Admirable ! " and with a kind interest, he asks 
— if she isn't a short-horn ? 

" Not a Short-horn," you reply ; and in way of 
apology for his error, remark that she has broken off 
one of her horns in the fence. 

At which he says, — " Ah, I see now ; — but re- 
sembles the Short-horns, doesn't she ? " 

" Yes — " you return, mildly — " a little ; her legs 
are like ; and I think she carries her tail — a good deal 
in the Short-horn way." 

At which he is himself again, and is prepared for 
a new farm venture. It comes presently, as a fine 
brood of Bremen geese waddle into sight. 

" Muscovies ? " 

" No, not ducks— geese — Bremen geese, but re- 
semble the Muscovies ; " (as unlike as they are to sea- 
fowl ; but shall not a host keep his guest in good 
humor ?) 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 259 

" I shouldn't have known 'em from Muscovies," 
he says. And I really don't suppose that he would. 

A good-natured city-guest, who comes to see you 
in your retirement, is very apt to talk in this strain 
upon farming matters. It is engaging, but not im- 
proving. 

You stroll, by and by, into the library ; and 
leave him for a few moments lounging in the arm- 
chair, while you slip out*-4o give some orders to the 
ditchers in the meadow. 

Upon your return, entering somewhat brusquely 
(expecting to find him deep in some book), you 
waken him out of a sound sleep. 

" Upon my word," he says, % this is a beautiful 
air ; if I lived here I should sleep half my time." 

The reflection is a somewhat dismal one, — though 
well meant. 

All this, however, illustrates what I want to say 
— that the citizen engrossed in active professional or 
business pursuits, when he visits a farm friend, goes 
with the very sensible purpose and hope — of escaping 
for a while the interminable mental strain of the city, 
and of giving himself up to full relaxation. And this 
fact makes the isolation of which I have spoken, more 
apparent than ever. 

And it is an isolation that cannot altogether be 
left behind one. On your visits to the city, friends 



2 GO MY FARM. 

will remark your seediness, not unkindly, but with an 
oblique eye-cast up and down your figure — as a jockey 
measures a stiff-limbed horse — long out to pasture. 
You may wear what toggery you will — keeping by 
the old tailors, and showing yourself Men gante, and 
carefully read up to the latest dates ; still you shall 
betray yourself in some old dinner-joke — dead long 
ago. And the friends will say kindly, after you are 
go^e, " How confoundedly; iSfcedy Rus. has grown ! " 

Were this all, it were little. But. the clash and 
alarum of cities have stirred things to their marrow, 
which you know only o*itsidedly. The great nervous 
sensorium of a contin nt, — with its wiry nerves raying 
like a spider's web, in all directions, — is packed with 
subtle and various meanings, which you, living on an 
outer strand of the web, can neither understand nor 
interpret. Mere accidental contact will not estab- 
lish affinity. In a dozen quarters a boy puts you 
right ; and some girl tells you newnesses you never 
suspected. The rust is on your sword ; thwack as hard 
as you may, you cannot flesh it, as when it had every 
day scouring into brightness. 

Dickering. 

SOMETIME or other, if a man enter upon farm 
life — and it holds true in almost every kind of 
life — there will come to him a necessity for bargain- 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 261 

ing. It is a part of the curse, I think, entailed upon 
mankind, at the expulsion from Eden, — that they 
should sweat at a bargain. When a Frenchwoman 
with her hand full of gloves, — behind her dainty coun- 
ter, — asks the double of what her goods are worth, 
you are noway surprised. You accept the enormity, 
as a symptom of the depravity of her race, — which is 
balanced by the suavity of her manner. 

But when a hard-faced, upright, sabbath-keeping 
New-England bank-officer or select-man, asks you 
the double, or offers you the half, of what a thing is 
really worth, there is a revulsion of feeling, which no 
charm in his manner can drive away. Unlike the 
case of the French shop-woman, I feel like passing 
him — on the other side of the street. 

And yet all this is to be met (and conquered, I 
suppose) by whoever has butter, or eggs, or hay, or 
fat-cattle to sell. I ventured once to express my 
surprise to a shrewd foreman who had charge of this 
business — for I manage it by proxy as much as I can 
— that a staid gentleman with his ten thousand a 
year of income, should have insisted upon a deduc- 
tion of two cents a bushel in the price of his pota- 
toes, in view of a quart of small ones, that had insin- 
uated themselves in the interstices : I think I hear 
his horse-laugh now, as he replied — " Why, sir, it s 
the way he grew rich." 



262 MY FARM. 

The idea struck me as novel ; but upon reflection 
I am inclined to think it was well based. As I said, 
— often as possible, I accomplish this business by 
proxy ; and, in consequence, have made some bad 
debts by proxy. But proxy is not always available. 
There are customers who insist upon chaffering with 
the ' boss.' Such an one has dropped in, on a morn- 
ing ii« whio.h yo" happen to "be deeply engaged. He 
wishes to ' take a look ' at a horse, which he has 
seen advertised for sale. The stable is free to his 
observation, and the attentive Pat is at hand ; but 
the customer wants a talk with the ' Squire.' 

It is a staunch Canadian horse, for which you 
have no further use. You paid for him, six months 
gone, a hundred and fifty dollars, and you now name 
a hundred dollars as his price. I never yet met a 
man who sold a horse for as much as he gave — unless 
he were a jockey ; I never expect to. 

" Mornin', Squire." 

" Good morning." 

" Bin a lookin' at y'er hoss." 

" Ah ! " 

" Middlin' lump of a hoss." 

" Yes, a nice horse." 

" D'n know as you know it, but sich hosses an't 
bo salable as they was a spell back." 

" Ah ! " 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 263 

" They're gittin' a fancy for bigger hosses." 

Silence. 

" Put that pony to a heavy cart, and he wouldn't 
do nothin'." 

" You are mistaken ; he's a capital cart-horse." 

" Well, I don't say but what he'd be handy with 
a lightish load. Don't call him spavined, do ye ? " 

tc No, perfectly sound." 

u That looks kinder like a spavin " — rubbing his 
off hind leg. 

" Ant much of a hoss doctor, be ye ? " 

" Not much." 

" Don't kick, dooz he ? " 

" No." 

" Them little Kanucks is apt to kick." 

Silence, and an impatient movement, which I 
work off by pulling out my watch. 

" What time o' day 's got to be ? " 

" Eleven." 

" Thunder ! I must be a goin' ; — should like to 
trade, Squire, but I guess we can't agree. I s'pose 
you'd be askin' as much as — sixty — or — seventy dol- 
lars for that are hoss — wouldn't ye ? " 

" A hundred dollars is the price, and I gave fifty 
more." 

" Don't say ! Gave a thundering sight too much. 
Squire." 



264 MY FARM. 

" Pat, you may put up the horse ; I don't think 
the gentleman wants him." 

" Look o' here, Squire ; — ef you was to say — 
something — like — seventy, or — seventy-five dollars, 
now, — there might be some use in talkin'." 

" Not one bit of use," (impatiently) — turning on 
uij heel. 

" Say, Squire, — ever had him to a plough *t " 

" Yes." 

" Work well ? " 

" Perfectly well." 

" Fractious any ? Them Kanucks is contrary crit« 
ters when they've a mind to be." 

" He is quite gentle." 

" That's a good p'int ; but them that's worked til] 
they git quiet, kinder gits the spirit lost out on 'em 
— an't so brisk when you put 'em to a waggin. 
Don't you find it so, Squire ? " 

" Not at all." 

" How old, Squire, did ye say he was ? " (looking 
in his mouth again). 

" Seven." 

" Well — I guess he is ; a good many figgers nigh- 
er that, than he is to tew — any way." 

" Patrick, you had better put this horse up." 

" Hold on, Squire," and taking out his purse, he 
counts out — " seventy — eighty, — and a five, — and two, 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 265 

— and a fifty — there, Squire, 'tant worth talkin' about ; 
I'll split the difference with ye, and take the hoss." 

" Patrick, put him up." 

At which the customer is puzzled, hesitates, and 
the horse is entering the stable again, when he breaks 
out explosively — 

" Well, Squire, here's your money ; but 

you're the most thunderin' oneasy man for a dicker 
that I ever traded with — I'll say that for ye." 

And the horse is transferred to his keeping. 

" S'pose you throw in the halter and blanket, 
Squire, don't ye ? " 

" Give him the halter and blanket, Patrick." 

" Aad, Patrick, you 'ant nary old curry-comb you 
don't use, you could let me have ? " 

" Give him a curry-couib, Pat." 

" Squire, you're a clever man. Got most through 
y'r hayin' ? " 

" Nearly." 

" Well, I'm glad on't. Had kinder ketchin' 
weather up our way." 

And with this return to general and polite con- 
versation, the bargaining is over. It may be amus- 
ing, but it is not inspiriting or elevating. Yet very 
much of the country-trade is full of this miserable 
chaffering. If I have a few acres of woodland to 
Bell, the purchaser spends an hour in impressing upon 
12 



26(3 MY FARM. 

me his c idee ' — that it is scattered and mangy, and 
has been pirated upon, and that wood is * dull,' with 
no prospect of its rising ; if it is a cow that I venture 
in the market, the proposed purchaser is equally volu- 
ble in descriptive epithets, far from complimentary ; 
she is ' pooty well on in years,' rather scrawny, *■ not 
much for a bag,' — and this, although she may be the 
identical Devon of my Short-horn friend. If it is a 
pig that I would convert into greenbacks — he is 
i flabby,' 4 scruffy,' — his ' pork will waste in bilin'.' 
In short if I were to take the opinions of my excel- 
lent friends the purchasers — for truth, I should be 
painfully conscious of having possessed the most 
mangy hogs, the most aged cows, the scrubbiest 
veal, and the most diseased and stunted growth of 
chestnuts and oaks, with which a country-liver was 
ever afflicted. 

For a time, in the early period of my novitiate, I 
was not a little disturbed by these damaging state- 
ments ; but have been relieved on learning, by farther 
experience, that the urgence of such lively falsehoods 
is only an ingenious mercenary device for the sharp- 
ening of a bargain. But while this knowledge puts 
me in good temper again with my own possessions, it 
sadly weakens my respect for humanity. 

Amateur farmers are fine subjects for these chaf- 
ferers ; they yield to them without serious struggle 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 267 

The extent and the manner of their losses, under the 
engineering abilities of those wiry old gentlemen who 
drive sharp bargains, is something quite beyond their 
comprehension. It would be well if harm stopped 
here. But this huckstering spirit is very leprous to char- 
acter. It bestializes ; — it breaks down the trader's 
own respect for himself, as much as ours. The man 
who will school himself into the adoption of all man- 
ner of disguisements about the cow he has to sell, 
will adopt the same artifices and quibbles about the 
opinions he wishes to force upon your acceptance. 
Let him mend by showing all the spavins in the next 
horse he has for sale (there will be some, or he would 
never sell) ; and his reformation is not altogether 
hopeless. 

The Bright Side. 

THUS far I have been dealing with the shadows— 
heavily laid on ; let me now, with a finer brush, 
touch in the lights upon my picture. The chemical 
puzzles, the disappointments, the isolation, the fa- 
tigues, the chaffering bargainers do not fully describe 
or give limit to the good old profession of farming. 
And even when these clouds — hindrances I call them 
— niost accumulate, the kindly sun flashes through, 
warming all the fields below me into golden green, 
and a kindly air stirs all the poplars into silver 



268 MT FARM. 

plumes, and I am beguiled into a new and a more 
admiring estimate of the country life. 

Arcadia with its sylvan glories comes, drifting to 
my vision, and the pleasant Elian fields sloping to the 
sea. A stately Greek gentleman — Xenophon — who 
has won great renown by his conduct of an army 
among the fastnesses of Armenia, and on the borders 
of the Caspian, has retired to his estates on the Ionian 
waters, and writes there a book of maxims for farm 
management, which are not without their significance 
and value to every farmer to-day. And hitherward, 
across the blue wash of the Adriatic, in the midst of 
the Sabine country, which is northward and eastward 
of Rome, I know a Roman farmer — Cato — who has 
been listened to with rapt attention in the Roman 
Senate, and who — centuries before the time when 
Horace was amateur agriculturist, and planted So- 
racte and Lucretilis in his poems — wrote so mi- 
nutely, and with such rare sagacity, upon all that 
relates to country living, and to country thrift, that I 
might to-morrow, in virtue of his instructions only, 
plant my bed of asparagus, and so dress and treat it 
(always in pursuance of his directions) as to insure 
me for the product a prize at the County-Fair ; — if, 
indeed, the shoots did not rival those famous ones of 
Ravenna — of which Pliny speaks — weighing three to 
the pound. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 269 

I know a poet too, whose music floating over 
Italy, before yet the battle blasts of her direst civil 
strife were done, weaned soldiers from their blood 
scent to the tranquil offices of husbandry ; and that 
melody of the Georgics is floating still under all the 
ceilings of all the school-houses of New England. 
The most pretentious and the most ambitious c f the 
later emperors of the East — Porphyrogenitus — has 
left no more enduring monument of his reign, than 
the compend of agricultural instructions, compiled 
under his order, and bearing title of " Geoponica 
Geoponicorum." 

I observe, too, in my card-basket, the address of 
a certain Pietro di Crescenzi, who has come all the 
way from the fourteenth-century-Bologna to pay 
me a visit — in a tight little surtout of white vellum 
that smacks of the loves of Bembo, or of the wicked- 
ness of the Borgia ; and who has talked of horses and 
cattle, and wheat-growing, and vegetable-raising, as 
familiarly as if he were justice of the peace in our 
town. Lord Bacon has contributed to our stock of 
information about garden culture, and the elegant 
pen of Lord Karnes has illustrated the whole subject 
of practical husbandry. But I do not cite these 
names for the sake of making any idle boast of 
the antiquity and dignity of the craft ; we have too 
much of that, I think, in our agricultural addresses. 



270 2*T FARM. 

We live in days when a calling — whatever it may be 
— cannot find establishment of its value or worth, in 
the echoes — however resonant and grateful — of what 
has once belonged to it, or of the dead voices that 
honored it. The charms of Virgil and the shrewd 
observations of Cato will go but a little way to re- 
commend a country life in our time, except that life 
have charms in itself to pique a man's poetic sensibil- 
ities — and lessons in every field and season, to tempt 
and reward his closest observation. 

Yet it is very remarkable how nearly these old 
authorities have approached the best points of mod- 
ern practice ; and again and again we are startled out 
of our vanities by the soundness of their suggestions. 
Rotation of crops, surface drainage, ridging of lands, 
composting of manures, irrigation, and the paring 
and burning of stubble-lands are all hinted, if not 
absolutely advised, in treatises written ten centuries 
ago. Nor have I a doubt but that a shrewd man 
acting upon the best advices which are to be found 
in the various books of the Geoponica (the latest 
not later than the sixth century), and with no other 
instructions whatever— save what regards the dex- 
terous use of implements — would manage a grain 
field, a meadow, or an orchard, better than the half 
of New England farmers. 

At first blush, it seems very discouraging to think 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 271 

that we have put no wider gap between ourselves 
and those twilight times. The gap is, however, far 
wider than it seems ; for while those old gentlemen 
made good hits in their practice, they rarely an- 
nounced a principle on which good cultivation de- 
pended, but they were egregiously at fault. The 
centuries, with their science and added experience, 
have solved the reasons of things ; not all of them, 
indeed — as Liebig in his last book needlessly tells us 
— but enough of them to enlist a more intelligent 
method of culture. The ancients recommended a 
rule of practice, because it had succeeded in a score 
or a hundred of trials ; but if some day it failed, they 
must have groped considerably in the dark for a 
cause. We lay down a rule of practice in obedience 
to certain clearly determined natural laws ; and if 
failure meets us, we know it is due — not to falsity of 
the laws — but to some one of a rather wide circle 
of contingencies, not foreseen or provided against. 
And it is the due adjustment and measurement of 
precisely this circle of contingencies — whether be- 
longing to weeds, weather, or markets — which most 
thoroughly tests the sagacity of the modern farmer. 

This sagacity is of far larger service, than I think 
scientific farmers are willing to admit. Over and over 
it happens that some uncouth, raw, strapping, unread 
man succeeds, year after year, in making crops which 



272 MY FARM. 

astonish the neighborhood. You know he has no sci- 
ence, — nitrogen is Greek to him ; sulphuric acid, for 
all he can tell, might lie in the juice of an apple ; he 
knows nothing of fermentations — nothing of physiol- 
ogy, yet his crops are monstrous. His tools are some- 
thing old, though firm and compact ; his team is al- 
ways in good order, although his barns may be some- 
what shaky. 

He could not himself explain to you his success ; 
you perceive that he manures well, that he ploughs 
thoroughly, that he plants good seed, that he hoes in 
season. This is all ; but all is so well timed by a native 
sagacity — by an instinctive sense (as would seem) of 
the wants and habits of the crop, growing out of 
close observation — that the success is splendid. A 
man sets up beside him, and buys guano and fish, and 
the best tools, and employs a chemist to analyze his 
soil — but his crops do not compare with those of his 
rude neighbor, who sneers at chemistry and fine 
farming. Of course I do not mean to join him in his 
sneers ; I only mean to illustrate how a large saga- 
city, guided by its own instincts, has very much to 
do with good farming ; and in a way not clearly ex- 
plicable — certainly not explicable by its possessor. 

Just so, you will sometimes find, far back in the 
country, a shrewd old physician, utterly unread in the 
new books, who laughs at the Gazette des Ilopitmtx 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS, 273 

and the Chirurgical, and yet who has that rave insight 
which enables him to detect and wrestle with disease 
strangely well. His long observation, his comparison 
of trifles, his estimate of the moral forces at work are 
so just and discriminating, that he brings a tremen- 
dous power of judgment to the case. Put him in a 
room for consultation, and his gray eye tweaks, his 
lips work nervously ; he cannot enter into the learned 
discourse of the younger men of the profession ; he is 
dazed by it all — wishing he were learned, if learn- 
ing helps ; but when appeal is made to him, there is 
such clear, sagacious, homely cut-down into the very 
marrow of the difficulty, as absolutely confounds the 
young doctors ; all this, not because he does not carry 
learning, but because he carries brain — and uses it. 

Any man with good brains may succeed in farm- 
ing — if he uses them. By this, I mean that any man 
with a clear head — though not specially crammed 
with information — and who brings a cool, sagacious, 
unblinking outlook to the offices of husbandry, will 
succeed, without a knowledge of the principles on 
which its more important operations are based. And 
the practice of such a man, if faithfully recorded in 
all its details, would be of more service in the illus- 
tration of scientific laws, than the halting experience 
of a half dozen neophytes, who work by the vague out- 
line of some pet theory. I had rather have such a man 



274 MY FARM. 

for tenant, than one fresh from the schools, bringing 
an exaggerated notion of salts, and a large contempt 
for sagacity. If on some day of latter summer the 
milch cows rapidly fall away in their ' yield,' I should 
expect the latter to puzzle himself about the sudden 
exhaustion of some particular constituent of the milk 
food, and to multiply experiments with bran or bone 
meal for its supply ; but I should expect the sagacious 
veteran, under the same circumstances, with a bold 
philosophy, to attribute the shortcoming to the 
scorching suns of August, that have drunk up all the 
juices of the grass ; and I should expect him to meet 
the want by a lush and succulent patch of pasturage, 
which his foresight has kept in reserve. 

Business Tact. 

AKIN to this sagacity is a certain business tact, 
which is a large helper to whoever would suc- 
cessfully engage in agricultural pursuits. It implies 
and demands adaptation of crops to soils, exposure, 
and the market wants. It is eminently opposed 
to the drowsiness in which a good many honest 
country-livers are apt to indulge. It reckons time at 
its full value ; it does not lean long on a hoe-handle 
for gossip. 

The farmer who turns his capital very slowly, and 
only once in the year, is not apt to be quickened into 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 275 

business ways and methods. The retired trader, who 
plants himself some day beside him, bringing his old 
prompt habits of the counter, will very likely, if a 
shrewd observer, outmatch him in a corn crop,— out- 
match him in pork, — outmatch him in everything, ii 
the year's balance were struck and shown. And all 
this in spite of the trader's comparative inexperience, 
and by reason only of his superior business tact. 

The finest shows of fruits at the autumn fairs — 
excepting always those of the professed nurserymen 
— are made, in three cases out of five, by mechanics, 
or by business men, who have brought to this little 
episode in their life, the methodical habits, and the 
observance of details, which govern their ordinary 
business duties. Not being in the way of leaving 
book accounts, or stock on hand, to take care of 
themselves, they are no more inclined to leave an in- 
vestment in trees or orcharding — to take care of itself. 
They reckon upon care at the outset, and they bestow 
it. The farmer, who has complacently smiled at 
their inexperience in tillage, and is confounded by 
the results, will loosely attribute them all to a lavish 
and thriftless expenditure of money. But the conclu- 
sion is neither logical, nor warranted, — in the majority 
of instances, — by the facts. No superior fruit can be 
grown without labor and extreme care, and if these 
be controlled by a business system, they will be far 



276 MY FARM. 

more economically bestowed, than when subject to 
no order in their application. 

From time to time I observe that some venerable 
old gentleman in my neighborhood is overtaken by 
one of those sporadic fevers of improvement, which 
will sometimes, and very strangely, attack the most 
tranquil and self-satisfied of men. The attack is a 
slight one, of the orchard type. He consults far and 
near in regard to the best sorts of fruit. He devotes 
to the experiment one of his best lots, reserving the 
very best for his next year's patch of potatoes. The 
land he reckons in ' good heart,' since he has just 
taken off a heavy crop of corn. He digs his holes, 
after an elaborate system of garden measurement and 
stake-driving, which, to his poor, fagged brain, seems 
the very climax of geometric endeavor. The young 
trees are carefully staked, and for a year or two show 
a thrifty look. But the spring temptation to put a 
crop between the roots is irresistible ; the ploughing 
oxen browse a few — knock over a few — break off a 
few. This maddens our friend into a c laying-down ' 
of the orchard to grass ; he half promises himself, in- 
deed, that he will give hand-cultivation to the trees,— 
but he does not ; his fever is abating, and so is his 
orcharding. The mosses fasten on the young trees, 
the borers play havoo, the caterpillars strip them, the 
rank grass strangles them. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 277 

From beginning to end there has been no business 
forecast of the requisite labor involved, no method in 
its prosecution — no estimate of the scheme as a busi- 
ness operation. 

It is certain that by a special dispensation of 
Providence in favor of those who make up the bulk 
of the human family, a man may secure a simple live- 
lihood in agricultural pursuits, with less of energy, 
less of promptitude, less of calculation, and greater 
unthrift generally, than would be compatible with 
even this scanty aim, in any other calling of life. 
With a respectable crop insured by only a moderate 
amount of attention and activity, the temptation to a 
lazy indifference, and a sleepy passivity, is immense. 
There are farmers who yield to the temptation grace- 
fully and completely. The stir, the wakefulness, the 
promptitude that seize upon new issues, develop new 
enterprises, create new demands, are as foreign to the 
majority of landholders, as a ringing discussion of 
new topics, or a juicy haunch of Southdown, to their 
tables. 

But whatever may be the triumphs of business 
tact — and of a just apportionment of capital, between 
land and implements, or fertilizers, the real question 
with a man of any considerable degree of cultivation 
who meditates country life, — is not whether legitimate 
attention will secure a tolerable balance sheet, and 




278 MY FARM. 

the fattening of fine beeves, but whether the life and 
the rural occupations offer verge and scope for the 
development of his culture — whether land and land- 
scape will ripen under assiduous care into graces that 
will keep his attachment strong, and enlist the activ- 
ities of his thought ? 
Let us inquire. 

Place for Science. 

ECAUSE a man cannot revolutionize farming 
and its practice by clean copies of Boussin- 
gault and Liebig under his arm, or upon his table, it 
by no means follows that an intelligent person who is 
concerned in rural occupations may not profitably 
give days and nights to their study. Because we 
cannot conquer all diseases, and clearly explain all 
the issues of life and death by the best of medical 
theories, it by no means follows that the best medical 
practitioner should therefore abandon all the literature 
of the subject. The scientific inquirers who direct 
their view to agricultural interests, deal with prob- 
lems which are within the farmer's domain ; and if 
their solutions are not always final or directly avail- 
able, the very intricacy of their nature must pique his 
wonder, and enlist his earnest inquiry. 

A magnificent mystery is lying under these green 
coverlets of the fields, and within every unfolding 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 279 

germ of the plants. The chemist is seeking to unrid- 
dle it in his way ; while we farmers, — by grosser 
methods, — are unriddling it, in ours. Checks and him 
drances meet us both ; both need an intimate com- 
parison of results for progress. If we sneer at the 
chemist for his shifting theories in regard to the ni- 
trogenized manures — no one of which is sufficiently 
established for the direction of a fixed practice — the 
chemist may return the sneer with interest, when he 
sees us making such application of a valuable salt, as 
shall lock up its solubility and utterly annul its effi- 
cacy. It is a pretty little duel for our intelligent ob- 
server to watch : the chemist fulminating his doc- 
trines, based on formulas and an infinity of retorts ; 
and we, replying only with the retort — courteous and 
practical. But always the unfathomable mystery of 
growth — vegetable and animal — remains ; the chem- 
ist seeking to explain it, and we only to promote it. 
If the chemist could explain by promoting it, he 
would turn farmer ; and if farmers could promote it 
by trying to explain it, they would all turn chemists. 
Many good people, of a short range of inquiry, 
and a shorter range of reflection, imagine that when 
the agriculturist has, by the chemist's aid, deter- 
mined the elements of his crops, and by the same aid, 
determined the merits of different bags of phosphates 
or guanos, that nothing remains but to match these 



280 MY FARM. 

chemical colors as he would match colts, — and the race 
is won. They fancy that the new analyses and ex- 
periments — so delicate and so elaborate — are by their 
revelations reducing the art of farming to a simple 
affair of the mechanical adjustment of regularly-bil- 
leted chemical forces. There could not be a greater 
mistake made ; so far from simplifying, the new in- 
vestigations demand a larger practical skill, since the 
conditions under which it works are amplified and 
extended. The old bases of procedure, if faulty, 
were at least compact ; the experimental farmer dealt 
with but few, and those clearly defined ; but scien- 
tific investigation, by its refining processes, has split 
the old bases of action into a hundred lesser truths, 
each one of which must be taken into the account, 
and modify our operations. 

There was a time, for instance, when science, ob- 
serving that a living plant built itself out of the 
debris of dead plants, declared for the primal neces- 
sity of a large supply of decayed vegetable material. 
This at least was simple, and the farmer, if he had 
only his stock of humus, left the further fulfilment 
of the miracle of growth to wind and weather. In 
process of time, however, science detected the rare 
luxuriance which ammonia imparts to plant foliage, 
and after refining upon the observation, declared for 
nitrogen as the great needed element ; schedules were 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 281 

prepared and widely published, in which the various 
manures were graduated in value, in strict accordance 
with their respective admixtures of nitrogenous ma- 
terial. The quiet farmer accepts the theory, and con- 
siders the wonderful effects that follow the applica- 
tion of the droppings from his dovecot, a demonstra- 
tion of its truth. 

But he has hardly nestled himself warmly into 
this belief, — modified to a degree by the humus doc- 
trine, than a distinguished chemist comes down upon 
us all with the representation — supported by a large 
array of figures — that nitrogen is already present in 
ample quantity in almost all soils, and that the vital 
necessity in the way of fertilizers, is the mineral ele- 
ment of the plant. This splinters once again the 
compactness of our purpose, and puts us upon a keen 
scent for the soluble phosphates ; though without 
destroying our faith in good vegetable-mould and 
strong-smelling manures. 

And not only in this direction, but also in what 
relates to the feeding of animals, the germination of 
seeds, the comminution of soils, the chemical effects 
of air, and light, and warmth — we have a hundred 
minute truths by which to adjust our practical man- 
agement, where we had formerly less than a score of 
gross ones. And in this adjustment — modified still 
further by a great many physiological and meteorolo* 



282 MY FARM. 

gical considerations — I think a man of tolerable parts 
might find enough to lay his mind to very closely, 
and to encourage some activity of thought. 

There will be disappointments — as in every sphere 
of life. I have felt them keenly and often. The 
humus has baffled my expectations, and my potatoes ; 
the nitrogenous riches have shot up into thickets of 
rank and watery luxuriance ; the phosphoric acid has 
oozed into some unthrifty combination, or has re- 
mained locked up in an unyielding nugget of Som- 
brero. But little disappointments count for nothing, 
when (as now) we are reckoning the pabulum which 
agricultural employments furnish for intellectual ac- 
tivity. The rural adventurer may not only regale 
himself with a considerable series of nice chemical 
puzzles at every cropping-time, but he may give his 
thoughts to original investigation of the habits of the 
plants themselves ; the career of a Decandolle could 
have had no finer start-point than a country farm 
with its living herbaria, and its opportunities for ob- 
servation ; we want a good monograph of our great 
national crop of maize — so soon as the man shall ap- 
pear to make it. We want, too, some Buffon (with- 
out his foppery) to unearth our field mice, and to put 
a great tribe of insect depredators to flight. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 283 

^Esthetics of the Business. 

WHAT is needed, perhaps more than all else, in 
our agricultural regions, is — such intelligible, 
imitable, and economic demonstrations of the laws 
of good taste, as shall provoke emulation, and redeem 
the small farmer — unwittingly, it may be — from his 
slovenly barbarities and his grossness of life. Here 
is verge, surely, for a man's cultivation, for his apti- 
tude, and for those graces which shall fix his attach- 
ment while they plead their lessons of appeal. 

It seems hardly necessary to urge a necessity for 
this direction of effort. There is certainly no race 
of country-livers in the world, who, with equal, or 
even a kindred intelligence, are so destitute of all 
sense of the graces of life and home, as the small 
New England farmers. 

A certain stark neatness, confined mostly to kitch- 
ens, pantries, and such portions of the door-yard as 
are under the eye of the goodwife, mostly limits their 
efforts in this direction. It may be that a staring 
coat of white paint upon the house completes the in- 
vestiture of charms ; while, at every hand, heaps of 
rubbish — cumbering the public road — and piles of 
straggling wood, dissipate any illusion which a well- 
scrubbed interior, or the fresh paint, may have 
created. 



284 MY FARM. 

Here and there we come upon a certain neatness 
and order in enclosures, buildings, and fields ; but ten 
to one the keeping of the picture is absolutely ruined 
by the slatternly condition of the highway, to which, — 
though it pass within ten feet of his door, — the farmer, 
by a strange inconsequence, pays no manner of heed. 
He makes it the receptacle of all waste material, and 
foists upon the public the offal, which he will not 
tolerate within the limits of his enclosure. And the 
highway purveyors are mostly as brutally unobserv- 
ant of neatness as the farmer himself ; nay, they seem 
to put an officious pride into the unseemliness and 
rawness of their work ; and it is only by most per- 
sistent watchfulness that I have been able to prevent 
some bullet-headed road-mender from digging into 
the turf-slopes at my very door. 

Here and there I see, up and down the country, 
frequent attempts at what is counted ornamentation 
— fantastic trellises cut out of whitened planks, cum- 
brous balustrades, with a multitude of shapeless 
finials, or whimsical pagodas — imitations of what 
cannot be imitated, even if worthy ; — but of the hun- 
dred nameless graces, wrought of home material, 
delighting you by their unexpectedness, piquing you 
by their simplicity, and winning upon every passer- 
by, by their thorough agreement with landscape, and 
surroundings, and the offices of the farmer, I see far 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 285 

less. The only idea of elegance and beauty which 
finds footing, is of something extraneous — outside his 
life — not mating with his opportunities or purposes — 
and only to be compassed, as a special extravagance, 
upon which some town joiner must lavish his ' ogees,' 
and which shall serve as a blatant type of the farm- 
er's ' forehandedness.' This is all very pitiful ; it 
gives no charm ; it educates to no sense of the tender 
graces of those simple, honest adornments which 
ought to refine the country-liver, and to refine the 
tastes of his children. I am not writing in any spirit 
of sentimental romanticism. If Arcadia and its pas- 
torals have gone by (and I think they have), God, 
and nature, and sunshine, have not gone by. Nor 
yet the trees, and the flowers, or green turf, or a 
thousand kindred charms, which the humblest farmer 
has in his keeping, and may spend around his door 
and homestead, with such simple grace, such afflu- 
ence, such economy of labor, such unity of design, as 
shall enchain regard, ripen the instincts of his chil- 
dren to a finer sense of the bounties they enjoy, and 
kindle the admiration of every intelligent observer. 

A neglect of these attractions, which are so con- 
spicuous along all the by-ways of England, and in 
many portions of the continent, is attributable per- 
haps in some degree to the unrest of much of our 
rural population. The man who pitches his white 



286 MY FARM. 

tent beside the road, for what forage he may 
easily gather up, and is ready always for a sale, will 
care little for any of the more delicate graces of 
home. And with those who have some permanent 
establishment, I think the root of the difficulty may 
lie very much in that proud and sensitive individual- 
ity which is the groAvth of our democratic institu- 
tions. There is an absolute and charming iittingness 
about most of these humble rural adornments, of 
which I speak, which our progressive friend does not 
like to adopt, by reason of their fittingness, and be- 
cause they give quasi indication of limited means and 
humble estate. When, therefore, such an one makes 
blundering effort to accomplish something in the way 
of decorative display, it is very apt to take a grand- 
iose type, showing vulgar strain toward those adorn- 
ments of the town which are wholly unsuited to his 
habits and surroundings. Thus a thriving ruralist 
with a family of two, will build a house as large as a 
church, and perch a cupola upon it, from which he 
may review the flat country for miles, while he con- 
tents himself with occupancy of the back-kitchen. 
If contented with small space, why not, in the name 
of honesty, declare it boldly, instead of covering the 
truth, under such lumbering falsehood ? What for- 
bids giving to the country home a simple propriety 
of its own, with its own wealth of rural decoration — 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 287 

its shrubbery, its vines, its arbors, instead of chal- 
lenging unfavorable comparison with an entirely dif- 
ferent class of homes ? If a man is disposed to ad- 
vertise by flaming architecture and appointments — ■ 
' 1 am only farmer by accident, and competent (as 
you see) to live in a grand way,' there is little hope 
that he will ever do anything to the credit of farm- 
ing interests, or contribute very largely to the best 
charms of our rural landscape. The attempt to bet- 
ter one's condition is always praiseworthy ; but it is 
only base and ignoble to attempt to cover one's con- 
dition with an idle smack of something larger. 

There will always be in every moderately free 
country a great class of small landholders, in whose 
hands will lie for the most part, the control of our 
rural landscape, and the fashioning of our wayside 
homes, and when they shall take pride, as a body, in 
giving grace to these homes, the country will have 
taken a long step forward in the refinements of civil- 
ization. If I have no coaches and horses, I can at least 
hang a tracery of vine leaves along my porch, so 
exquisitely delicate that no sculpture can match it ; 
if I have no conservatories with their wonders, yet 
the sun and I together can build up a little tangled 
coppice of blooming things in my door-yard, of 
which every tiny floral leaflet shall be a miracle. 
Nay, I may make my home, however small it be, so 



288 MY FARM. 

complete in its simplicity, so fitted to its offices, so 
governed by neatness, so embowered by wealth of 
leaf and flower, that no riches in the world could add 
to it, without damaging its rural grace ; and my 
gardeners — Sunshine, Frost, and Showers are their 
names — shall work for me with no crusty reluctance, 
but with an abandon and a zeal that ask only grati- 
tude for pay. 

But let us come to details. 

Walks. 

A "WALK is, first of all, a convenience ; whether 
leading from door to highway, or to the stable 
court, or through gardens, or to the wood, it is essen- 
tially, and most of all — a convenience ; and to despoil 
it of this quality, by interposing circles or curves, 
which have no meaning or sufficient cause, is mere 
affectation. Not to say, however, that all paths 
should be straight ; the farmer, whose home is at a 
considerable remove from the highway, and who 
drives his team thither, avoiding rock, and tree, and 
hillock, will give to his line of approach a grace that 
it would be hard to excel by counterfeit. Pat, stag- 
gering from the orchard, under a bushel of Bartlett 
pears, and seizing upon every accidental aid in the 
surface of the declivity to relieve the fatigue of his 
walk — zigzagging, as it were in easy curves, is uncon- 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 289 

sciously laying down — though not a graceful man — a 
very graceful line of march. And it is the delicate 
interpretation of these every-day deflexities, and this 
instinctive tortuousness (if I may so say), which sup- 
plies, or should supply, the landscape gardeners with 
their best formulae. 

There is no liver in the country so practical, or of 
so humble estate, but he will have his half dozen paths 
divergent from his door ; and these he may keep dry, 
and in always serviceable condition, by simply remov- 
ing the soil from them to the depth of eighteen or 
twenty inches, and burying in them the scattered 
stones and debris, which are feeding weed-crops in 
idle corners ; he will thus relieve himself of the use- 
less material that might cumber the highway, besides 
possessing himself of the greater part of the top soil 
removed, for admixture with his composts. And 
this substitution may progress, season by season ; as 
the garden rakings or refuse material accumulate, he 
has only to remove a few cubic yards of earth from 
his paths, bury the waste, and reserve the more avail- 
able portions of the mould. 

The same rules of construction are good for all 
road-ways, more especially for the farmer who wants 
unyielding metal beneath his heavy cartage of spring. 
The jDerfection of roads of course supposes perfect 
drainage, and a deep bed of stone material ; but I 
13 



290 MY FARM. 

am only suggesting methods which are in keeping 
with ordinary farm economies. 

There must needs be directness in all paths com- 
municating with out-buildings, and the exigencies of 
economic and effective culture demand the straight 
lines in the kitchen garden ; but when I take a friend 
to some pretty point of view, or a little parterre of 
flowers dropped in the turf, — we are not hurried ; the 
dainty curves make a pleasant cheatery of the ap- 
proach. Thus there is charming accord between the 
best rules for landscape outlay, and the wants of the 
country-liver ; where economy of tillage or of labor 
demands directness, the paths should be direct ; and 
where economy of pleasure suggests loitering, the 
paths may loiter. And so, they loiter away through 
pleasant wooded coppices — doubling upon themselves 
on some rocky pitch of hill — short reaches, concealed 
each one from the other — blinded by thick under- 
wood — wantoning in curves, until presently from 
under a low-branching beech tree, there bursts on 
the eye a great view of farm, and forest, and city, 
and sea ; always a charming view indeed, though we 
toiled straight toward it, in broad sunshine ; but the 
winding through the coppice, unsuspecting, — busied 
with ferns and lichens, and shut in by dark over- 
growth against any glimpse of sky, — makes it ten- 
fold ravishing. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 291 

What if such walks be not nicely gravelled — what 
if you come upon no grubbing gardeners ? If only 
they be easy and serviceable, I love their rain stains, 
and their line mosses creeping into green mats ; I 
love their irregular borders, with a fern or a gentian 
nodding over the bounds — a pretty sylvan welcome 
to your tread. There are little foot-paths I know, — 
only beaten by the patter of young feet — winding 
away through lawn or orchard to some favorite apple 
tree, — frequented most, after some brisk wind-storm 
has passed over, — that I think I admire more than any 
gravelled walks in the world. 

And there are other simple foot-paths, which I re- 
member loitering through day after day, in the rural 
districts of England, with a sense of enjoyment, that 
never belonged to saunterings in the alleys of Ver- 
sailles. 

A man does not know England, or English land- 
scape, or English country feeling, until he has broken 
away from railways, from cities, from towns, and 
clambered over stiles, and lost himself in the fields. 

Talk of Chatsworth, and Blenheim, and 

Eaton Hall ! Does a man know the pleasure of 
healthy digestion by eating whip-syllabub ? Did 
Turner go to Belvoir Castle park for the landscapes 
which link us to God's earth ? 

What a joy and a delight in those field foot-paths 



292 MY FARM. 

of England ! Not the paths of owners only ; not 
cautiously gravelled walks ; but all men's paths, 
where any wayfarer may go ; worn smooth by poor 
feet and rich feet, idle feet and working feet ; open 
across the fields from time immemorial ; God's paths 
for his people, which no man may shut ; — winding — 
coiling over stiles — leaping on stepping-stones through 
brooks — with curves more graceful than Hogarth's — 
hieroglyphics of the Great Master written on the land, 
which, being interpreted, say — Love one another. 

We call ours a country of privilege, yet what 
rich man gives right of way over his grounds ? 
What foot-path or stile to cheat the laborer of his 
fatigue ? 

Shrubbery. 

OES the reader remember that upon the June 
day on which I first visited My Farm, I de- 
scribed the air as all allow with the perfume of pur- 
ple lilacs ; and does he think that I would ungrate- 
fully forget it, or forget the lilacs ? The Lilac is one 
of those old shrubs which I cling to with an admira- 
tion that is almost reverence. The Syringo (Phila- 
delphus) is another ; and the Guelder-rose (Viburnum) 
is another. They are all infamously common ; but so 
is sunshine. 

The Mezereum, the Forsythia, and the Weigelia 




HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 293 

have their attractions ; — the Mezereum, because it is 
first comer in the spring, and shows its modest crim- 
son tufts of blossoms, while the March snows are lin- 
gering ; the Forsythia follows hard upon it, with its 
graceful yellow bells ; and the Weigelia, though far 
later, is gorgeous in its pink and white — but neither 
of them is to be matched against the old favorites I 
have named. 

Yet it is after all more in the disposition of the 
shrubbery, than in the varieties, that a rational pleas- 
ure will be found. It is not a great burden of bloom 
from any particular shrub that I aim at. I do not 
want to prove what it may do at its best, and singly ; 
that is the office of the nurseryman, who has his ales 
to make. But I want to marry together great ranks 
of individual beauties, so that May flowers shall 
hardly be upon the wane, when the blossoms of June 
shall flame over their heads ; and June in its turn 
have hardly lost its miracles of color, when July 
shall commence its intermittent fires, and light up its 
trail of splendor around all the skirts of the shrub- 
bery. I want to see the delicate white of the Clematis 
(Virginica) hanging its graceful festoons of August, 
here and there in the thickets that have lost their 
summer flowers ; and after this I welcome the black 
berries of the Privet, or the brazen ones of the twin- 
ing Bitter-sweet. 



294 MY FARM. 

Or, it is some larger group with which we deal — 
half up the hill-side, screening some ragged nursery 
of rocks — and a tall Lombardy-poplar lifts from its 
centre, while shining, yellowish Beeches group around 
it — crowding it, forcing all its leafy vigor (just where 
we wish it) into the topmost shoots ; and amid the 
Beeches are dark spots of young Hemlocks — as if the 
shadow of a cloud lay just there, and the sun shone 
on all the rest ; and among the Hemlocks, and reach- 
ing in jagged bays above and below them are Sumacs 
(so beautiful, and yet so scorned) lifting out from all 
the tossing sea of leaves, their solid flame-jets of fiery 
crimson berries. Skirting these, and shining under 
the dip of a Willow, are the glossy Kalmias which, at 
midsummer, were a sheet of blossoms ; and the hem 
of the group is stitched in at last with purple Phloxes 
and gorgeous Golden-rod. 

I know no limit indeed to the combinations which 
a man may not affect who has an eye for color, and a 
heart for the light labor of the culture. There is, 
unfortunately, a certain stereotyped way of limiting 
these shrubberies to a few graceful exotics, — which, 
of course, the gardeners commend, — and of rating 
the value of foliage by its cost in the nursery. It is 
but a narrow and ungrateful way of dealing with 
the bounties of Providence. It may accomplish un- 
der great care, very effective results \ but they will 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 295 

not open the eyes of men of humble estates to 
the beauties that are lurking in the forest all around 
them, and which only need a little humanizing care to 
rival the best products of the nurseries. Steering clear 
of this intolerance, I have domesticated the White- 
birch, and its milky bole is without a rival among 
all the exotics ; the Hardbeam (Carpinus), with its fine 
spray, and the Witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginica) with 
its unique bloom upon the bare twigs of November, 
are thriving in my thickets. The swamp Azalias, and 
the Kalmias I have transferred successfully, in their 
season of flowering.* There are also to be named 
among the available native shrubs, — the Leather- wood 
(Dirca palustris) with delicate yellow bloom, glossy 
green leaves, and an amazing flexibility of bough, on 
which once a year my boy forages for his whip- 
lashes ; the Spice-wood (Laurus benzoin) is always 
tempting to the children by reason of its aromatic 
bark, and in earliest spring it is covered with fairy 
golden flowers ; the spotted Alder is a modest shrub 
through the summer, but in autumn it flames out 
in a great harvest of scarlet berries, which it carries 
proudly into the chills of December ; the red-barked 
Dog-wood (Cornus sanguinea) supplies annually a 
great stock of crimson whips, and a charming liveli- 

* A much safer way is to give the young plants a season or 
two of domestication in a patch of nursery ground. 



296 MY FARM. 

ness of color for any interior rustic ornamentation, 
which a wet day may put in hand ; the Swamp-willow 
is the very earliest of our native shrubs, to feel the 
heats of the March sun, and season after season, the 
little ones bring in from its clump, its silvery strange 
tufts of bloom, and say : " The Willow mice have 
come, — and the spring." 

Nor must I forget the Barberry, beautiful in its 
bloom, and still more beautiful with its crimson fruit, 
— the May-flower, the Sumac, the Sweet-brier, the 
Bilberry, with its fairy bells, and the whole race of 
wild vines — among which not least, is the luxuriant 
Frost-grape, tossing its tendrils with forest freedom 
from the tops of the tallest trees, and in later June 
filling the whole air with the exquisite perfume of its 
blossoms. 

It may seem that a great estate and wide reach 
of land may be demanded for the aggregation of all 
these denizens of the wood ; yet it is not so ; I have 
all these and more than these, with room for their 
own riotous luxuriance, in scattered groups and 
copses, without abstracting so much as an acre from 
the tillable surface of the land. The brambles, thick- 
ets, and unkempt hedge-rows which half the farmers 
of the country leave to encroach upon the fertility 
and order of their fields, work tenfold more of harm, 
than the coppices which I have planted on rocky de- 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 297 

clivities, and on lands, else unserviceable ; or as a 
shelter to my garden or poultry yard, — as a screen 
from the too curious eyes of the public ; — tangled 
wildernesses, not without an order of their own, - 
offering types of all the forest growth, where the 
little ones may learn the forest names, and habit — a 
living book of botany, whose tender lessons are read 
and remembered, as the successive seasons waft us 
their bloom and perfume. 

These groups will, of course, demand some care 
for their effective establishment ; care is a price we 
must all pay for whatever beautiful growth we secure 
— whether in our trees or our lives. 

It is specially imperative that all turf be removed, 
wherever a group of shrubs or forest trees are to be 
planted ; trenching is by no means essential, and 
with many of the forest denizens, promotes a woody 
luxuriance that delays bloom. My own practice has 
been to compost the turf as it was taken up, upon the 
ground, with lime, and possibly a castor-pomace, or 
other nitrogenous fertilizer ; this I reserved for a top- 
dressing, as the shrubs might seem to require, and no 
other application of manure is ever made. Three 
times, the first year, and twice, the second year, it 
may be necessary to give hoe-culture, in order to 
keep the grass and other foreign growth in abeyance. 
After this, a single dressing is amply sufficient ; and 
13* 



298 MY FARM. 

on his after-dinner strolls to the thickets, the planter 
will not forget his pruning-knife and his saw. 

A little patch of good, and thoroughly tilled nur- 
sery-ground is very convenient as a tender upon 
these wood-groups, as well as upon the orchard, 
Within a small one of my own — of less than an 
eighth of an acre, I have now thriving hundreds of 
hemlocks, white-pines, birches, maples, alders, vines, 
beeches, willows, kalmias, — with which I may at any 
time thicken up the skirts of the established groups 
to any color I like, or plant a new one upon some 
scurvy bit of land, which has proved itself unremu- 
nerative under other croppings. 

Altogether, these shows of forest foliage, with 
here and there an exotic, or a fruit-tree thrown in, — 
involve less cost than one would give to an ordinary 
crop of corn ; and when the corn is harvested, the 
crop is done ; but with my shrubberies — of which I 
know every tree from the day of its first struggle 
with the changed position — the weird, wild growth 
is every year progressing — every year presenting 
some new phase of color or of shape : — every spring 
I see my trees rejoicing in a flutter of young leaves, 
and then wantoning — like grown girls — in the lusty 
vigor of summer: in autumn I look wistfully on 
them, wearing gala-dresses, whose colors I dare not 
name, and when these are shivered by the frost, — 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 299 

tranquilly disrobing, and retiring to the sleep of 
winter. 

Rural Decoration. 

AMONG the things which specially contribute 
to the charms of a country-home, are those 
thousand little adornments, which a person of quick 
observation and ready tact can easily avail himself 
of; and while gratifying his own artistic perceptions, 
he can contribute to the growth of a humble art-love, 
which it is to be hoped will some day give a charm 
to every road-side, and to every country cottage. It 
is by no means true that a taste of this kind must 
necessarily — like Sir Visto's — prove a man's ruin. 
The land is indeed a great absorbent ; and if no dis- 
cretion be brought to the direction of outlay in 
adornments and improvements, or if they be not or- 
dered by a severe and inexorable simplicity, it is quite 
incredible what amounts of money may be expended. 
I have in an earlier portion of this volume, hinted 
at certain changes which may be made, in the throw- 
ing out of some half dozen angular and unimportant 
enclosures, at the door, into open lawn — in the re- 
moval of unnecessary fences, and the establishment 
of groups of shrubbery to hide roughness, or to fur- 
nish shelter : all which involve little expenditure, and 
are not in violation of any rules of well-considered 



300 MY FARM. 

economy. I may now add to these the effects of 
little unimportant architectural devices, not requiring 
a practical builder, and which while they lend a great 
charm to landscape, give an individuality to a man's 
home. 

The reader will perhaps allow me to particularize 
from my own experience. There were, to begin 
with, some four or five disorderly buildings about 
the farm-house — sheds, shops, coal-houses, smoke- 
houses — built up of odds and ends of lumber — boards 
matching oddly, some half painted, others too rough 
for paint — altogether scarcely bad enough for removal, 
and yet terribly slatternly and dismal in their general 
effect. They were not worth new covering ; painting 
was impossible ; and whitewashing would only have 
lighted up the seams and inequalities more staringly. 
A half a mile away was a little mill, where cedar 
posts were squared by a circular saw, and the slabs 
were packed away for fuel (and very poor fuel they 
made). One day, as my eye lighted upon them, an 
idea for their conversion to other uses struck me, and 
fructified at once. I bought a cord or two at a nom- 
inal rate, and commenced the work of covering my 
disjointed and slatternly outbuildings with these 
rough slabs. It was a simple business, requiring 
only even nailing, with here and there a little ' fur- 
ring out ' to bring the old angles to a square, with 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 301 

here and there the deft turning of a rude arch, with 
two crooked bits, over door or window. Farm la- 
borers, under direction, were fully competent to the 
work ; and in a couple of days I had converted my 
unsightly buildings into very tasteful, rustic affairs, 
harmonizing with the banks of foliage behind and 
over them, and giving capital foothold to the vines 
which I planted around them. 

In keeping with their effect, I caused gates to be 
constructed of the simplest material, from the cedar 
thickets ; varying these in design, and yet making 
each so simple as to admit of easy imitation, and to 
unite strength, solidity, and cheapness. If, indeed, 
these latter qualities could not be united, the work 
would not at all meet the end I had in view — which 
was not merely to produce a pretty effect, but to 
demonstrate the harmony of such decorative work 
with true farm economy. One often sees, indeed, rus- 
tic-work of most cumbrous and portentous dimensions 
— overladen with extraordinary crooks and curves, 
and showing at a glance immense labor in selection 
and in arrangement. All this may be pleasing, and 
often exceedingly beautiful ; but it is a mere affecta- 
tion of rural simplicity ; it wears none of that fit and 
simple character which would at once commend it to 
the eye of a practical man as an available and imitable 
feature. If I can give such arrangement to simple 



302 MY FARM. 

boughs, otherwise worthless, or to pine-pickets of 
simple cost — in the paling of a yard, or the tracery 
of a gate, as shall catch the eye by its grace of out- 
line, and suggest imitation by its easy construction, 
and entire feasibility, there is some hope of leading 
country tastes in that direction ; but if work shows 
great nicety of construction, puzzling and complicated 
detail, immense absorption of labor and material, it 
might as well have been — so far as intended to en- 
courage farm ruralities — built of Carrara marble. 

Again a stone wall, or dyke, is not generally 
counted an object of much beauty, except it be laid up 
in hammered work ; this, of course, is out of the ques- 
tion for a farmer who studies economy : but suppose 
that to a substantial stone fence of ordinary construc- 
tion, I am careful, by a choice of topping-stones, to 
give unbroken continuity to its upper line ; and sup- 
pose that the abutments, instead of wearing the usual 
form, are carried up a foot or more above this line in a 
rude square column, gradually tapering or ' battering ' 
toward the top ; suppose upon this top I place a flat 
stone nearly covering it, and upon this a smaller stone 
some four inches in thickness, and again, upon the 
last, the largest and roundest boulder I can find. At 
once there is created a graceful architectural effect, 
which gives a new air to the whole line of wall. Tet 
the additional labor involved is hardly to be reckoned. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 303 

Gates, in all variety, dependent on position and 
service, offer charming opportunity for simple and 
effective rural devices. Far away in the garden it 
may be worth while to throw a rude rooflet over one, 
where a man may catch refuge from a shower ; in an- 
other quarter, you may carry up posts and link them 
across in rustic trellis, to carry the arms of some toss- 
ing vine ; a stile, too, where neighbors' children, for- 
getful of latches, are apt to stroll in for nuts or ber- 
ries, or on some cross-path to school, may, by simple 
adjustment of log steps and overhanging roof of 
thatch, or slabs, take a charming effect, and work 
somewhat toward the correction of that unflinching 
and inexorable insistance upon rights of property, 
which induces many a crabbed man to nail up his 
gates, and deny himself a convenience, for the sake 
of circumventing the claims of an occasional stroller. 

Rustic seats are an old and very common device ; 
but with these, as with gateways and palings, sim- 
plicity of construction is the grand essential. I see 
them not unfrequently so fine and elaborate, that one 
fears a shower may harm them ; and when so fine as 
to suggest this fear, they had much better be of rose- 
wood and bamboo. A simple bit of plank between 
two hoary trunks — held firmly in place by the few 
bits of gnarled oak-limbs from which arms, legs, and 
back are adroitly — hinted, rather than fashioned — is 



304 MY FARM. 

more agreeable to country landscape, fuller far of 
service and of suggestion, than any of the portentous 
rustic-work in city shops. 

The due adjustment of colors is also a thing to be 
considered in the reckoning of rural effects ; thus, 
with my old weather-stained house, I do not care to 
pls\ce new paint in contrast ; the old be-clouded tint 
harmonizes well with the rustic work of fences and 
outbuildings ; while away, upon the lawn, or opening 
into green fields, or — better still — in the very bight 
of the wood, I give the contrast of a brilliant and 
flashing white. 

I am touching a very large subject here, with a 
very short chapter. Indeed, there is no end to the 
pretty and artistic combinations by which a man who 
loves the country with a fearless, demonstrative love, 
may not provoke its rarer beauties to appear. 
Flower, tree, fence, outbuilding — all wait upon his 
hands ; and the results of his loving labor do not end 
when his work is done ; but the vines, the trees, the 
mosses, the deepening shadows, are, year after year, 
mellowing his raw handiwork, and ripening a new 
harvest of charms. And in following these, I think 
there is an interest — not perhaps quotable on 'Change, 
but which rallies a man's finer instincts, and binds 
him in leash — not wearisome or galling — to the great 
procession of the seasons, ever full of bounties, as of 
beauties. 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 305 

Flowers. 

THERE is a class of men who gravitate to the 
country by a pure necessity of their nature ; 
who have such ineradicable love for springing grass, 
and fields, and woods, as to draw them irresistibly 
into companionship. Such men feel the confinement 
of a city like a prison. They are restive under its 
restraint. The grass of an area patch of greensward 
kindles their love into flame. They linger by florists' 
doors, drawn and held by a magnetism they cannot 
explain, and which they make no effort to resist. 
They are not necessarily amateurs, in the ordinary 
sense of that term. I think they are apt to be pas- 
sionate lovers of only a few, and those the commonest 
flowers — flowers whose sweeet home-names reach a 
key, at whose touch all their sympathies respond. 

They laugh at the florist's fondness for a well 
rounded holly-hock, or a true-petalled tulip, and ad- 
mire as fondly the half-developed specimens, the 
careless growth of cast-away plants, or the accidental 
thrust of some misshapen bud or bulb. I suspect I 
am to be ranked with these ; my purchase of an ox- 
eye daisy on the streets of Paris will have already 
damaged my reputation past hope, in the eyes of 
the amateur florists. If these good people could 
see the homely company of plants that is gathered 



306 MY FARM. 

every winter in my library window, they would be 
shocked still farther. 

There is a careless group of the most common 
ferns ; a Rose-geranium, a Daphne, a common 
Monthly-rose, are the rarest plants I boast of. But 
there are wood-mosses with a green sheen of velvet ; 
they cover a broad tray of earth in rustic frame-work, 
in which the Geraniums, the mosses, the Daphne, 
and a plant of Kenil worth-Ivy coquette together. 
An upper shelf is embossed with other mosses ; there 
is a stately Hyacinth or two lifting from among them, 
and wild ferns hang down their leaves for a careless 
tangle with the Geraniums and Ivy below. Above 
all, and as a drapery for the arched top, the Spanish 
moss hangs like a gray curtain of silvered lace. 

A stray acorn, I observe, has shot up in the tray, 
and is now in its third leaf of oak-hood ; in the cor- 
ners, two wee Hemlock-spruces give a background of 
green, and an air of deeper and wilder entanglement, 
to my little winter-garden. A bark covering, with 
bosses of acorn-cups, and pilasters of laurel-wood, 
sharpened to a point, make the lower tray a field of 
wildness, — fenced in with wildness. The overhanging 
bridge (I called it an upper shelf) is a rustic gallery 
■ — its balcony of twisted osiers filled in with white 
mosses from old tree-stumps, and the whole support- 
ed by a rustic arch of crooked oaken twigs. Finally, 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 307 

the cornice from which the Spanish moss is pendant, 
is a long rod of Hazel, around which a vine of Bitter- 
sweet has twined itself so firmly, that they seem in- 
corporate together ; and to their rough bark the 
moss has taken so kindly, that it has bloomed two 
full years after the date of its first occupancy. There 
are daintier hands than mine that care for this little 
garden of wildness, and give it its crowning grace ; 
but here — I may not speak their praise. 

The other southern window is at a farther remove 
from the open wood-fire ; its floral show is, therefore, 
somewhat different ; and the reader will, I trust, ex- 
cuse me a little particularity of description, since it 
will enable me to show how much may be done with 
limited material and space. 

Upon the window-sill, — some eighteen inches in 
breadth by forty in length, — are placed four bits of 
oak-wood five inches in length, squarely sawn from a 
young forest tree, which serve as standards or sup- 
ports, to a tray of plank five inches in depth, and cov- 
ered with unbarked saplings, so graduated in size, as 
to make this base (or tray) appear like the plinth of a 
column. This is filled with fine garden-mould, and 
there are grooves in the plank-bottom communicating 
with one drainage hole, beneath which is placed an 
earthen saucer. Fitting upon this tray is a glazed 
case with top sloping to the sun, and with its quoins 



308 MY FARM. 

and edges covered with bark, and embossed with 
acorn-cups — to correspond with the base. The fitting 
is not altogether so perfect as that of a Wardian case, 
but quite sufficient for all practical purposes. 

Throughout the summer I keep this little window- 
garden stocked with the most brilliant of the wood 
mosses ; a slight sprinkling once in thirty days keeps 
them in admirable order ; and if I come upon some 
chrysalis in the garden whose family is unknown, I 
have only to lodge it upon my bed of mosses, and in 
due time I have a butter-fly captive for further exam- 
ination. As the frosts approach I throw out my 
mosses, and re-stock my garden with fragrant violets 
and a few ferns. These keep up a lusty garden show 
until January, when again I change the order of my 
captives — this time incorporating a large share of 
sand with the earth in the tray — and setting in it all 
my needed cuttings of Verbenas, of Fuchsias, and of 
Carnations. They thrive under the glass magically ; 
and by early March are so firm-rooted and rampant in 
growth, that I can pot them, for transfer to a fresh- 
laid pit out of doors. I now amend the soil, and 
sprinkling it with a dash of ammoniacal water, sow in 
it the Cockscomb, Peppers, Egg-plants, and whatever 
fastidious plants require special care, while along the 
edges I prove my over-kept cabbage and clover seed. 
All these make their way, and in due time come to 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 309 

their season of potting, when I give up my little gar- 
den to a careless array of the first laughing flowers 
of spring. 

Can you tell me of so small a window anywhere 
that shows so many stages of growth ? Nor have I 
named all even yet. A rustic arch, steep as the Ri- 
alto at Venice, overleaps this tiny garden, and bears 
upon its centre a miniature Swiss chalet, while down 
either flank, upon successive steps, are little bronze 
mementos of travel — among which the delicate ten- 
drils of a German-ivy (planted upon a ledge of its 
own) intertwine and toss their tender leaflets into the 
doors and windows of the chalet. 

But I am lingering in-doors, when my book is es- 
sentially an out-of-door book. 

I am not about to lay down any rules for flower- 
beds or for flower culture ; the gardening books are 
full of them ; and by their aid, and that of a dexterous 
gardener, any one may arrange his parterres and 
his graduated banks of flowers, quite secundum 
artem. And I suppose, that, when completed, these 
orderly arrays of the latest and newest floral wonders 
are enjoyable. Yet I am no fair judge ; the apprecia- 
tion of them demands a c booking-up ' in floral science 
to which I can lay no claim. I sometimes wander 
through the elegant gardens of my town friends, 
fairly dazzled by all the splendor and the orderly 



310 MY FARM. 

ranks of beauties ; but nine times in ten — if I do not 
guard my tongue with a prudent reticence, and allow 
my admiration to ooze out only in exclamations — I 
mortify the gardener by admiring some timid flower, 
which nestles under cover of the flaunting Dahlias or 
Peonies, and which proves to be only some dainty 
weed, or an antiquated plant, which the florists no 
longer catalogue. Everybody knows how ridiculous 
it is to admire a picture by an unknown artist ; and 
I must confess to feeling the fear of a kindred ridi- 
cule, whenever I stroll through the gardens of an ac- 
complished amateur. 

But I console myself with thinking that I have 
company in my mal-adroitness, and that there is a 
great crowd of people in the world, who admire spon- 
taneously what seems to be beautiful, without wait- 
ing for the story of its beauty. If I were an adept, 
I should doubtless, like other adepts, reserve my ad- 
miration exclusively for floral perfection ; but I thank 
God that my eye is not as yet so bounded. The 
blazing Daffodils, Blue-bells, English-cowslips, and 
Striped-grass, with which some pains-taking woman 
in an up-country niche of home, spots her little door- 
yard in April, have won upon me before now to a 
tender recognition of the true mission of flowers, as 
no gorgeous parterre could do. 

With such heretical views, the reader will not be 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 311 

surprised if I have praises and a weakness for the 
commonest of flowers. Every morning in August, 
from my chamber window, I see a great company of 
the purple Convolvulus, writhing and twisting, and 
over-running their rude trellis, while above and be- 
low, and on either flank of the wild arbor, their fairy 
chalices are beaded with the dew. A Scarlet-runner 
is lost — so far as its greenness goes — in the tangle 
of a hedge-row, and thrusts out its little candelabras 
of red and white into the highway, to puzzle the pas- 
sers-by, who admire it, — because they do not know it. 
A sturdy growth of Nasturtium is rioting around the 
angle of a distant mossy wall, at the end of a woody 
copse — so far away from all parterres, that it seems 
to passers some strange, gorgeous wild-flower ; and 
yet its blaze of orange and crimson is as common and 
vulgar as the wood-fire upon a farmer's hearth. Hol- 
ly-hocks — so far away you cannot tell if they be 
double or single (they are all single) — lift their stately 
yellows and whites in the edge of the shrubbery; 
Phloxes, purple and white, hem them in ; and at their 
season a wilderness of Roses bloom in the tangled 
thicket. 

Dotted about here and there, in unexpected places 
— yet places where their color will shine — are clumps 
of yellow Lilies, of Sweet- William, of crimson Peonies, 
of Larkspur, or even (shall I be ashamed to tell it?) 



312 MY FARM. 

of Golden-rod and of the Cardinal flower (Lobelia). 
In a little bed scooped from the turf and bordering 
upon the nearer home-walks, are the old-fashioned 
Spider-wort, and that old white Lily, which Raphael 
makes the Virgin hold on the day of her espousals. 
And yet you may go through half the finest gardens of 
the country and never find this antiquated Lily ! The 
sweet Violet and the Mignonette have their place in 
these new borders, as well as the roses. Cypress and 
Madeira vines twine, in leash with the German ivy, 
over a pile of stumps that have been brought down 
from the pasture ; under the lee of a thicket of pines, 
among lichened stones heaped together, is a group of 
ferns and Lycopodiums; and the sweet Lily of the Val- 
ley, — true to its nature and quality, — thrives in a dark 
bit of ground half shaded between two spurs of a 
bushy thicket. 

Of course, there are the Verbenas, for which every 
year a fresh circlet of ground is prepared from the 
turf, and a great tribe of Geraniums, to bandy scar- 
lets with the Salvias ; and the Fuchsias, too — though 
very likely not the latest named varieties ; nor are 
they petted into an isolated, pagoda-like show, but 
massed together in a little group below the edge of 
the fountain, where they will catch its spray, and 
where their odorless censers of purple and white and 
crimson may swing, or idle, as they will. And among 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 313 

the mossy stones from amid which the fountain gur- 
gles over, I find lodging places, not only for rampant 
wild-ferns, but for a stately Calla, and for some 
showy type of the Amaryllida?. 

It is in scattered and unexpected places, that 
I like my children to ferret out the wild-flowers 
brought down from the woods — the frail Colombine 
in its own cleft of rock, — the Wild-turnip, with its 
quaint green flower in some dark nook, that is like 
its home in the forest — the Maiden's-hair thriving in 
the moist shadow of rocks ; and among these trans- 
planted wild ones of the flower-fold, I like to drop 
such modest citizens of the tame country as a tuft of 
Violets, or a green phalanx of the bristling Lilies of 
the Valley. 

Year by year, as we loiter among them, after the 
flowering season is over, we change their habitat^ 
from a shade that has grown too dense, to some 
summer bay of the coppices ; and with the next year 
of bloom, the little ones come in with marvellous 
reports of Lilies, where Lilies were never seen before 
— or of fragrant Violets, all in flower, upon the 
farthest skirt of the hill-side. It is very absurd, of 
course ; but I think I enjoy this more — and the rare 
intelligence which the little ones bring in with their 
flashing, eager eyes — than if the most gentlemanly 
gardener from Thorburn's were to show a Dahlia, 
14 



314 MY FARM. 

with petals as regular as if they were notched by the 
file of a sawyer. 

Flowers and children are of near kin, and too 
much of restraint or too much of forcing, or too 
much of display, ruins their chiefest charms. I love 
to associate them, and to win the children to a love 
of the flowers. Some day they tell me that a Violet 
or a tuft of Lilies is dead ; but on a spring morning, 
they come, radiant with the story, — that the very 
same Violet is blooming sweeter than ever, upon some 
far away cleft of the hill-side. So you, my child, if 
the great Master lifts you from us, shall bloom — as 
God is good — on some richer, sunnier ground ! 

We talk thus : but if the change really come, 

it is more grievous than the blight of a thousand 
flowers. She, who loved their search among the thick- 
ets — will never search them. She, whose glad eyes 
would have opened in pleasant bewilderment upon 
some bold change of shrubbery or of paths, will never 
open them again. She — whose feet would have danced 
along the new wood-path, carrying joy and merri- 
ment into its shady depths, — will never set foot upon 
these walks again. 

What matter how the brambles grow ? — her dress 
will not be torn : what matter the broken paling by 
the water ? — she will never topple over from the 
bank. The hatchet may be hung from a lower nail 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 315 

now — the little hand that might have stolen posses- 
sion of it, is stiff — is fast ! God has it. 

And when spring wakens all its echoes — of the 
wren's song — of the blue-bird's warble, — of the plain- 
tive cry of mistress cuckoo {she daintily called her 
mistress cuckoo) from the edge of the wood — what 
eager, earnest, delighted listeners have we — lifting 
the blue eyes, — shaking back the curls — dancing to 
the melody ? And when the violets repeat the 
sweet lesson they learned last year of the sun and of 
the warmth, and bring their fragrant blue petals 
forth — who shall give the rejoicing welcome, and be 
the swift and light-footed herald of the flowers ? 
Who shall gather them with the light fingers, she 
put to the task — who ? 

And the sweetest flowers wither, and the sweet- 
est flowers wait — for the dainty fingers that shall 
pluck them, never again ! 

DJEkvooi, 

I HAVE now completed the task which I had as- 
signed to myself; and I do it with the burden- 
some conviction that not one half of the questions 
which suggest themselves in connection with Farm- 
life in America, can be discussed — much less resolved 
— within so narrow a compass. Yet I have endeav- 
ored to light up, with my somewhat disorderly array 



316 



MY FARM. 



of hints and suggestions, those more salient topics 
which would naturally suggest themselves to all who 
may have a rural life in prospect, or who may to-day 
be idling or planning, or toiling under the shadow of 
their own trees. 

There are no grand rules by which we may lay 
down the proportions of a life, or the wisdom of this 
or that pursuit ; every man is linked to his world of 
duties by capacities, opportunities, weaknesses, which 
will more or less constrain his choice. And I am 
slow to believe that a man who brings cultivation, 
refinement, and even scientific attainment, may not 
find fit office for all of them in country life, and so 
dignify that great pursuit in which, by the necessity 
of the case, the majority of the world must be always 
engaged. He may contribute to redeem it from those 
loose, unmethodical, ignorant practices, which are, in 
a large sense, due to the farmer's isolation, and to the 
necessities of his condition. And although careful 
investigation, study, and extended observation in 
connection with husbandry, may fail of those pecu- 
niary rewards, which seem to be their due, yet 
the cause in some measure ennobles the sacrifice. 
The cultivated farmer is leading a regiment in the 
great army whose foraging success is feeding the 
world ; and if he put down within the sphere of his 
influence — riotous pillage — wasteful excesses, and by 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 317 

his example give credit to order, discipline, and the 
best graces of manhood, — he is reaping honors that 
will endure : — not measured by the skulls he piles on 
any Bagdad plains, but by the mouths he has fed — 
by the flowers he has taught to bloom, and by the 
swelling tide of harvests which, year by year, he has 
pushed farther and farther up the flanks of the hills. 

I would not have my reader believe that I have 
carried out as yet within the limits of the farm herein 
described all that I have advised — whether in the 
things which relate to its productive capacity, or to 
its embellishment. All this ripens by slow progres- 
sion which we cannot unduly hasten. Nor do I know 
that full accomplishment would add to the charm ; I 
think that those who entertain the most keen enjoy* 
ment of a country homestead, are they who regard it 
always in the light of an unfinished picture — to which, 
season by season, they add their little touches, or 
their broad, bold dashes of color ; and yet with a 
vivid and exquisite foresight of the future completed 
charm, beaming through their disorderly masses of 
pigments, like the slow unfolding of a summer's day. 

In all art, it is not so much the bald image that 
meets the eye, as it is the crowd of suggested images 
lying behind, and giving gallant chase to our fancy — 
which gives pleasure. It is not the mere palaces in 
the picture of Venice before my eye, which delight 
me, but the reach of imagination behind and back of 



318 MY FARM. 

them — the shadowy procession of Doges — the gold 
cloth — the Bucintoro — the plash of green water kiss- 
ing the marble steps, where the weeds of the Adriatic 
hang their tresses, and the dainty feet of Jessica go 
tripping from hall to gondola. It is not the shaggy, 
Highland cattle, with dewy nostrils lifted to the 
morning, that keep my regard in Rosa Bonheur ; — 
but the aroma of the heather, and of a hundred High- 
land traditions, — a sound — as of Bruar water, — a 
sudden waldng of all mountain memories and soli- 
tudes. 

Again it must be remembered by all those who 
have rural life in anticipation, that its finer charms, 
and those which grow out of the adornments and 
accessories of home, are dependent much more upon 
the appreciative eye and taste of the mistress than 
of the master. If I have used the first person some- 
what freely in my descriptions, it has been from no 
oversight of what is justly due to another ; and I 
would have the reader believe — what is true — that 
all the more delicate graces which are set forth, and 
which spring from flowers or flowering shrubs, and 
their adroit disposition, are due to tenderer hands, 
and a more provident and appreciative eye than mine. 

I think that I have not withheld from view the 
awkwardnesses and embarrassments which beset a 



HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 319 

country life in New England, — nor overstated its 
possible attractions. I have sought at any rate, to 
give a truthful picture, and to suffuse it all — so far as 
I might — with a country atmosphere ; so that a man 
might read, as if the trees were shaking their leaves 
over his head, — the corn rustling through all its 
ranks within hearing, and the flowers blooming at his 
elbow. 

Be this all as it may, — when, upon this charming 
morning of later August, I catch sight, from my win- 
dow, of the distant water — where, as at the first — 
white sails come and go : — of the spires and belfries 
of the near city rising out of their bower of elms — 
of the farm lands freshened by late rains into un- 
wonted greenness ; — of the coppices I have planted, 
shaking their silver leaves, and see the low fiise of 
border flowers flaming round their skirts, and hear 
the water plashing at the door in its rocky pool, and 
the cheery voices of childre i, rejoicing in health and 
the country air, — I do not for a moment regret the 
first sight of the old farm house, under whose low- 
browed ceiling, I give this finishing touch to the last 
chapter of My Faem of Edgewood. 




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